The authors contributing to Fleeing Vesuvius represent an impressive range of expertise. Six are economists, four environmental scientists, three specialists in green commerce and marketing, two architects, two community organizers, one an environmental engineer, one a psychotherapist and one a former corporate attorney. Others have backgrounds in appropriate technology, ethics and local government. All are in basic agreement around the book’s central premise: the industrialized world needs to urgently downsize its energy use, both to stave off catastrophic climate change and to conserve dwindling fossil fuels.

The first two sections of Fleeing Vesuvius define the problem by outlining the scientific, technological and economic parameters of fossil fuel depletion. The last five focus on solutions, with examples from Europe and North America of pioneering programs local groups and communities are undertaking to wean themselves off fossil fuels.

The Link Between Fossil Fuels, Industrialization and Capitalism

Fleeing Vesuvius deliberately emphasizes fossil fuel depletion more than climate change, owing to the major role it played (according to the authors) in the 2008 economic collapse. The first and most important section of the book, “Energy Availability” addresses the economics of fossil fuel depletion. It lays out hard truths about the link between cheap fossil fuels, industrialization, capitalism and money. We are always taught that the industrial revolution of the late 18th century was the result of British technological innovation, the view promoted by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Unfortunately Smith totally overlooks the importance of cheap fossil fuel energy, at first from coal and later from oil and natural gas, in running the giant machines that replaced human labor.

In his Introduction, “Where We Went Wrong,” the late Irish economist Richard Douthwaite points out that one barrel of oil provides the equivalent labor of a man working forty hours a week for twelve years. He goes on to stress that before the advent of cheap fossil fuels, capitalism was impossible – an economy relying on human labor and animal power is too inefficient to support it. By definition capitalism depends on capital accumulation, the production of an economic surplus that can be reinvested in new capital (property and machines) to expand production even further. Producing a surplus of this size only became possible because of the vast amount of cheap (practically free) work performed by fossil fuel energy.

The other side of this argument is that industrialization and capitalism will eventually cease when fossil fuel becomes too prohibitively expensive to support it. In fact,

Douthwaite argues that the skyrocketing cost of oil ($148 a barrel) and food – not speculation in subprime mortgage derivates – were the root cause of the 2008 economic crisis.

The End of Industrial Agriculture

Part I of Fleeing Vesuvius also looks at the link between cheap fossil fuels and industrial agriculture. In addition to the fossil fuel energy required for farm machinery, food processing and transportation to market, oil and natural gas are essential in the production of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides that are an essential feature of industrial scale agriculture. Doing without them means returning to an era where people produced food and other basic needs with manure, human labor and draft animals. Prior to the industrial revolution, these primitive methods fed a global population of two billion. Many economists question whether it’s possible to provide for our current global population of seven billion without relying on fossil fuels.

Energy Return on Investment (EROI)

In the essay entitled “Future Energy Availability,” environmental physicist Chris Vernon explains the link between Peak Oil and Energy Return on Investment (EROI). EROI is defined as the amount of energy that must be expended to extract or produce surplus energy for business or household use. Although there’s still a lot of oil, gas and coal in the ground, we have reached the point where the reserves that are easy and cheap to extract have been used up. More importantly, owing to the enormous amount of energy required to produce some forms of renewal energy, renewable sources will never have the ability of fossil fuels to produce abundant cheap energy. Although wind, especially off-shore wind, and tidal energy have great promise, energy from these sources will remain quite costly for the foreseeable future. This leads Vernon to draw the conclusion that humankind will have no choice but to downsize their energy intensive lifestyles.

Money and Energy Scarcity

The main focus of the second section of Fleeing Vesuvius, “Innovation in business, money and finance,” is the link between energy availability and money. In it, Richard Douthwaite looks at our current debt based monetary system, which started at the beginning of the industrial revolution. He explains how banks create money out of thin air every time they approve a new loan and why continuous economic growth is necessary in order to pay off the debt created in this way. When economic growth stalls, as it did in 2008, the debt becomes unpayable.

With the end of cheap energy, according to Douthwaite, global leaders must accept that the era of continuous economic growth has also ended. This means our current debt-based system of money creation must also be scrapped. In addition to calling for government to remove control of money creation from private banks, Douthwaite also supports the creation of regional and local currencies. This preserves the ability of low income groups to trade products and services when the national currency is in short supply due to recession and deflation.

The Transition to a Fossil Energy-Free Society

The last five sections of the book focus on solutions, with inspiring examples of new approaches to land use, agriculture and industrial design from individuals, groups and communities who have begun the transition to a less energy-intensive lifestyle. There are two somewhat technical essays on using biochar as a carbon sink and the importance of soil mineral content in localized food production. Other essays look at national and international strategies for reducing carbon emissions, including the innovative “Cap and Share” approach put forward by Fiesta (Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability) in 2008. This would require primary fossil-fuel suppliers (e.g. oil companies) to buy permits to introduce fossil fuels into the economy. As fossil fuel suppliers pass these costs on to consumers, they, in turn, begin to seek out renewable energy alternatives. At the same time, revenue from the permits is used to help low income customers pay their energy bills.

Part 5 “Changing the way we live” includes an excellent essay by community organizer Davie Phillip describing some of the accomplishments of the worldwide Transition movement, started by Rob Hopkins (in Ireland and the UK) in 2002.

Part 6 “Changing the Way We Think” addresses the apathy and inertia that prevents most of the developing world from taking serious measures to address the catastrophic economic, ecological and resource crises we presently face. In “Cultivating hope and managing despair,” psychotherapist John Sharry compares this widespread apathy and inertia to Kubler Ross’s stages of grief in bereavement or impending loss (denial, anger, depression, acceptance). The impending collapse of our current way of life is the worst loss any of us can imagine. It should be no surprise that the initial response to such news is denial. Sharry suggests that Kubler Ross has left out an essential step between depression and acceptance – namely, the hopeful and constructive activity which is often necessary before full acceptance can occur.

Fleeing Vesuvius finishes with an Epilogue in which different authors give suggestions for specific steps people can take on an individual, community, national and international level in preparing for the eventual collapse of our present energy intensive economic system.

The North American edition of Fleeing Vesuvius has a preface by Richard Heinberg, author of the End of Growth and fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.This edition also contains an appendix, “Should the US try to avoid a financial meltdown?”, a dialogue between two of the economists who contributed essays (Richard Douthwaite and Tom Konrad).

Horgan is a writer for “Scientific American,” and approaches the question of whether war can be ended as a scientist. It’s all about research. He concludes that war can be ended, has in various times and places been ended, and is in the process (an entirely reversible process) of being ended on the earth right now.

The war abolitionists of the 1920s Outlawry movement would have loved this book, would have seen it as a proper extension of the ongoing campaign to rid the world of war. But it is a different book from theirs. It does not preach the immorality of war. That idea, although proved truer than ever by the two world wars, failed to prevent the two world wars. When an idea’s time has come and also gone, it becomes necessary to prove to people that the idea wasn’t rendered impossible or naïve by “human nature” or grand forces of history or any other specter. Horgan, in exactly the approach required, preaches the scientific observation of the success (albeit incomplete as yet) of preaching the immorality of war.

The evidence, Horgan argues, shows that war is a cultural contagion, a meme that serves its own ends, not ours (except for certain profiteers perhaps). Wars happen because of their cultural acceptance and are avoided by their cultural rejection. Wars are not created by genes or avoided by eugenics or oxytocin, driven by an ever-present minority of sociopaths or avoided by controlling them, made inevitable by resource scarcity or inequality or prevented by prosperity and shared wealth, or determined by the weaponry available. All such factors, Horgan finds, can play parts in wars, but the decisive factor is a militaristic culture, a culture that glorifies war or even just accepts it, a culture that fails to renounce war as something as barbaric as cannibalism. War spreads as other memes spread, culturally. The abolition of war does the same.

Those who believe that war is in our genes or mandated by overpopulation or for whatever other reason simply unavoidable or even desirable will not be attracted to Horgan’s book. But they should read it. It is written for them and carefully argued and documented. Those who, in contrast, believe it is as obvious as breathing air that we can choose to end war tomorrow will find a little sad comedy in the fact that the way we get people to choose to end a long-established institution is by rigorously persuading them that such choices have been made before and are already well underway. Yet, that is exactly what people need to hear, especially those who are on the edge between “War is in DNA” and “War is over if you want it.” Most human cultures never produced nuclear bombs or genetically engineered corn or Youtube. Many cultures have produced peace. But what if they hadn’t? How in the world would that prevent us from producing it?

Evidence of lethal group violence does not go back through our species’ millions of years but only through the past 10,000 to 13,000. Even chimpanzees’ supposed innate war spirit is not established. We are not the only primates who seem able to learn either war or peace. Annual war-related casualties have dropped more than ten-fold since the first half of the twentieth century. Democracy is no guarantee of peace, but it is allowing people to say no to war. Of course, democracy is not all or nothing. Some democracies, like ours in the United States, can be very weak, and weaker still on the question of war. What allows nations’ leaders to take countries into war, Horgan shows, is not people’s aggressiveness but their docility, their obedience, their willingness to follow and even to believe what authorities tell them.

Mistaken theories about the causes of war create the self-fulfilling expectation that war will always be with us. Predicting that climate change will produce world war may actually fail to inspire people to buy solar panels, inspiring them instead to support military spending and to stock up at home on guns and emergency supplies.

I wish Horgan had looked more at the motivations of those in power who choose war, some of whom do profit from it in various ways. I also think he understates the importance of the military industrial complex, whose influence Eisenhower accurately predicted would be total and even spiritual. It’s harder to work for the abolition of war when the war industry is behind your job. I think this book could benefit from recognition of the U.N. Charter’s limitations as compared with the Kellogg-Briand Pact, in its acceptance of wars that are either “defensive” or authorized by the United Nations. I think Horgan’s view of the Arab Spring and the Libyan War is confused, as he thinks in terms of intervention in countries where the United States had already long been intervened, and he frames the choices as war or nothing. I think the final chapter on free will is rather silly, confusing the philosophical point of physical determinism with how things look from our perspective, a confusion that David Hume straightened out quite a while ago.

But Horgan makes a key point in that last chapter, pointing to a study that found that when people were exposed to the idea that they had no free will they behaved less morally, choosing to behave badly, of course, with the very same free will they nonetheless maintained. Being free to choose, we can, in fact, choose things that most of us never dare imagine. Here’s John Horgan’s perfect prescription:

We could start by slashing our bloated military, abolishing arms sales to other countries, and getting rid of our nuclear arsenal. These steps, rather than empty rhetoric, will encourage other countries to demilitarize as well.

Or as Jean Paul Sartre put it — (Look, ma, no research!):

To say that the for-itself has to be what it is, to say that it is what it is not while not being what it is, to say that in it existence precedes and conditions essence or inversely according to Hegel, that for it ‘Wesen ist was gewesen ist’ — all this is to say one and the same thing: to be aware that man is free.

We may be in the advanced stages of going loony as a society and a polity, and yet expanding one’s awareness of how this process is proceeding is a form of enlightenment, even if the enlightenment is offered with some defeatist shading.

The United States of Fear is a collection of Tom Engelhardt’s writings from his TomDispatch blog. It turns our world inside out any number of times, allowing us to glimpse with startling clarity the horrifying world outside our cave without ever quite persuading us that the real world can be real if it isn’t on television, and not infrequently building into the presentation the understanding that there is no cure for what ails us.

Here’s an example. According to Engelhardt we dwell in a “Postlegal America”:

Is the Libyan war legal? Was Osama bin Laden’s killing legal? Is it legal for the president of the United States to target an American citizen for assassination? Were those ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ legal? … [Such questions] are irrelevant. Think of them as twentieth century questions that don’t begin to come to grips with twenty-first-century American realities. In fact, I think of them, and the very idea of a nation based on the rule of law, as symptoms of nostalgia for a long-lost republic.

This formulation crystallizes our understanding that we are not dealing here with something in the way of the peaks of corruption seen in past cycles. There is something new and different about an age in which our leading criminals go on book tours while people scream for the blood of our leading whistleblowers, an age in which blanket immunity shields those guilty of the largest crimes from either prosecution or public identification, an age in which Ed Meese’s contention (that anyone among the peasants who is accused of a minor crime is by definition guilty) walks hand-in-hand with Richard Nixon’s explanation (that if a president does it then it is not a crime). But Engelhardt’s formulation simultaneously belittles and discourages efforts to undo this development. Who wants to be irrelevant, to fail to come to grips with the proper century, to suffer from nostalgia? Well, I do, of course. I want to join Martin King’s International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. I don’t want to adjust to Postlegal Land.

In addition, according to Engelhardt, we have entered the Soviet Era in America:

It gives you chills to run across Communist Party general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at a Politburo meeting in October 1985, almost six years after Soviet troops first flooded into Afghanistan, reading letters aloud to his colleagues from embittered Soviet citizens. … Or, in November 1986, insisting to those same colleagues that the Afghan War must be ended in a year, ‘at maximum, two.’ … Or what about Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev … ‘There is no single piece of land in this country that has not been occupied by a Soviet soldier. Nevertheless, the majority of the territory remains in the hands of the rebels.’

Not only has the United States transformed itself into the Soviet Union as the new occupier of Afghanistan whistling past the imperial graveyard, but we have accomplished this in the most Hopeful manner without really changing anything other than creating a collective fantasy called Change:

In the midst of the Great Recession, under a new president with supposedly far fewer illusions about American omnipotence and power, war policy continued to expand in just about every way.

Engelhardt’s book takes us through the dark Bush-Cheney era and on through the sunkissed dawn of Obama’s codification and entrenchment of Bush-Cheney crimes as the new normalcy. Engelhardt starts with the Cheney-run empowerment of the members of the Project for the New American Century:

This may, in fact, be the first example in history of a think tank coming to power and actually putting its blue-sky suggestions into operation as government policy, or perhaps it’s the only example so far of a government in waiting masquerading as a think tank.

The agenda of that think tank is still the agenda of the White House and Pentagon. What has changed? In Engelhardt’s telling, we’ve gone from a government of fanatical pro-war visionaries to one with no vision at all, just momentum. Oh, and, as Engelhardt points out, the U.S. corporate media has stopped seriously covering the deaths of U.S. men and women in war. That’s a change. And the world’s biggest ever embassy in Iraq from the Bush era is now being duplicated in Pakistan — with Hopey Changey drapes no doubt.

Another change that Engelhardt draws out and focuses our eyes and ears on is what might be called the logorrhea of the lieutenants. “There’s a history still to be written,” writes Engelhardt as he publishes the first draft, “about how our highest military commanders came to never shut up.” Military propaganda targeting our own people is a daily diet now. And while the generals are talking, our economy is imploding, our infrastructure crumbling. We know this is happening, but we don’t usually contemplate the scale of it or push to do something about it. We’re too fascinated by all the medals on the generals’ uniforms. And we’re not the only ones. “I have no greater job,” Engelhardt quotes Obama saying, “nothing gives me more honor than serving as your commander in chief.” Engelhardt comments in typical fashion:

As ever, all of this was overlooked. Nowhere did a single commentator wonder, for instance, whether an American president was really supposed to feel that being commander in chief offered greater ‘honor’ than being president of a nation of citizens. In another age, such a statement would have registered as, at best, bizarre.

Like the Italian cruise ship captain who accidentally “tripped” and fell into a lifeboat and abandoned his floating city to its fate, the power madness Engelhardt depicts is framed in his book as the flailings of a beast in decline:

The proximate cause of Washington’s defeat is a collapse of its imperial position in a region that, ever since President Jimmy Carter proclaimed his Carter Doctrine in 1980, has been considered the crucible of global power. Today, ‘people power’ has shaken the pillars of the American position in the Middle East, while — despite the staggering levels of military might the Pentagon still has embedded in the area — the Obama administration has found itself standing helplessly and in grim confusion.

Now Engelhardt comes around to the possibility that indeed something can be done, at least by foreigners: “Never in memory,” Engelhardt writes in the excitement of last year’s Arab Spring, “have so many unjust or simply despicable rulers felt quite so helpless, despite being armed to the teeth — in the presence of unarmed humanity. There has to be joy and hope in that alone.”

If “The United States of Fear” helps the United States set aside the fear, there is no limit to what unarmed humanity can do, even here, even acting on its nostalgia for the never-quite-existent age of equality before the law.

Engels will compare his and Marx’s “bastard” progeny with the “legitimate” progeny of Herr Dühring with respect to economic production in this chapter. Dühring rejects any notion of the capitalist production system which claims that economic crises are due to the very nature of the structure of capitalism itself. That is a Marxian fantasy.

For Dühring, Engels says, “crises are only occasional deviations from ‘normalcy’ and at most only serve to promote ‘the development of a more regulated order.’” The Marxists maintain, au contraire, that crises are caused by over-production and this is a structural fault within the capitalist system itself. But Dühring rejects this and writes that the real reason for crises is, in his words, “the lagging behind of popular consumption … artificially produced under-consumption … with the natural growth of the NEEDS OF THE PEOPLE (!), which ultimately make the gulf between supply and demand so critically wide.”

To this Engels replies that the masses have been forced to under-consume throughout history and in every economic system based on class exploitation, therefore under-consumption is not some artificially produced phenomenon but something all class societies share — i.e., that the exploited class never has the value of its yearly production returned to it at the end of the year. The crises of industrial capitalism, however, only date from the the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

Thus, Engels concludes, it is under capitalism that periodic economic crises come into the world and while under-consumption of the masses is a PREREQUISITE it is not the CAUSE of crises. And knowing this, he says, “tells us just as little why crises exist today as why they did not exist before.”

Dühring, in fact, does not think mass markets are all that important anyway. He himself says that capitalist production happens to “depend for its market mainly on THE CIRCLES OF THE POSSESSING CLASSES THEMSELVES.” His confusion becomes only more apparent when he follows up on this by claiming that the most important industries (this is the 1870s remember) are cotton and iron production. But, Engels points out, the production of these two is entirely dependent on a mass market and the possessing class make up only an “infinitesimally small degree” of its market.

Engels then points out that capitalism, by it very need to grow and expand, brings about crises. He says, for example, in England there is just one small town (Oldham) that from 1872 to 1875 doubled its production of spun cotton [the number of its spindles went from 2.5 to 5 million] and this is just one of a dozen small towns around Manchester. Oldham, by the way, produced as much spun cotton as ALL of Germany (including Alsace). This was happening in towns all over Great Britain.

It thus shows “deep-rooted effrontery” on the part of Herr Dühring to blame the English masses for under-consumption rather than the capitalists for over-production when it comes to “the present complete stagnation in the yarn and cloth markets.”²

Engels ends his critique of Herr Dühring’s views on crises but gives a few quotes that demonstrate that Dühring has no idea about capitalism as an economic system but sees everything in terms of the behavior of individuals. If over-speculation and the unplanned building of private factories are responsible for crises we must see that as simply “the ordinary interplay of overstrain and relaxation” of the system and look closely at “the rashness of individual entrepreneurs and the lack of private circumspection” as one of the causes.

The only “rashness” here, Engels maintains, is the habit of turning the facts of economics into “moral reprobation.” This is a problem of our times as well, not just the time of Engels. How often do we hear talk about our current crisis as a product of “greed” on the part of Wall Street bankers and that they should pay their “fair share” of taxes and such rubbish as if the decay of capitalism is a moral disorder on the part of the ruling class instead of a structural disorder that requires the replacement of the system rather than remedial Sunday school classes for the capitalists.

But all this has been treated of in the previous chapter of Anti-Dühring and Engels wants to move on (Cf. “Frederick Engels on the Theoretical Development of Modern Capitalism” in the November 2011 Political Affairs). Engels will now turn his attention to Dühring’s new system of viewing socialism which is called “the natural system of society.”

Dühring bases his system of socialism on what he calls the “universal principle of justice” which applies everywhere and is independent of historical and economic facts. This is enough to disqualify it as idealistic nonsense but Engels wants to philosophically pepper spay Dühring for having the gall to attack Marx for being unclear and fuzzy as to what type of socialism he believes in. It appears that the demands made in the name of the workers in the Communist Manifesto are “erroneous half measures” far inferior to Dühring’s ideas which represent “a comprehensive schematism of great import in human history.”

Marx, according to Dühring, thinks of socialism as “nothing more than the corporative ownership by groups of workers … an ownership that is both individual and social.” Engels is upset because this is far from anything Marx has suggested and in truth actually applies to the system that Dühring has concocted.

Dühring advocates a federation of independent economic communes which compete with one another and which have absolute freedom of movement from one commune to another. In this crazy system the wealthy successful communes will out compete the poorly run communes which will become defunct as the people will all end up moving to the well run ones.

Production within the communes stays the same as production in the past — i.e., the communes are still capitalist in nature even though controlled by the workers. So the greatly touted natural system of justice and the new socialism amounts to the fact, Engels says, that “the commune takes the place of the capitalists.”

What are Dühring’s views on the most basic form of all hitherto existing methods of production — i.e., the division of labor? With respect to the primary division, that between TOWN and COUNTRY (or industry and agriculture) he has little to say beyond some common place remarks about its “inevitable” nature and the possibility of overcoming it in the future. Thin gruel from Engels’ point of view.

When it comes to the modern division of labor in trade and industry Dühring is very vague and only says that we have an “erroneous division of labor” and that all will be remedied in the future “as soon as account is taken of the various natural conditions and personal capabilities [of the workers].” Engels doesn’t say so, but Dühring’s views here are suspiciously similar to those of Plato in the Republic and very far from the socialist analysis of Marx to which Engels now turns.

Marx tells us that in all societies where production springs up “spontaneously” (including capitalism) we discover the means of production dominate the people not the other way around. The first great division of labour saw the development of towns and cities surrounded by peasant agriculturalists. This division has doomed rural people for thousands of years, Marx says, to “mental torpidity” and enslaved the town dwellers to their own specialized trade. This “stunting” of humanity increases with the increase of the division of labor.

Under capitalism the workers become tied to their machines and to one specific function and one tool. Capitalism, Marx says in Das Kapital “converts the laborer into a crippled monstrosity. by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts…. The individual himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional operation.” How much this has been alleviated by the modern day union movement varies from country to country and in proportion to the percentage of workers who are unionized. The large number of working people in the US for example, that vote Republican shows that “mental torpidity” is not confined to the rural populations of Texas, Iowa or Alaska (to name a few).

It is not just the workers who suffer under the present day division of labor but also, Engels says, the “empty-minded bourgeois” chasing after profits (Donald Trump comes to mind), the lawyers dominated by “fossilized legal conceptions” and so-called “educated classes” of society plagued by “local narrow-mindedness” and “mental short-sightedness”– just think of the tribe of Sunday morning news pundits paraded before the public by all the major TV networks, or the platoons of professors giving advice about everything under the sun and hardly agreeing on anything other than that capitalism is still the best of all possible economic formations.

But how are we to overcome this division of labor and the consequent alienation of humanity from its potentials and possibilities? One way only says Engels: “in making itself the master of all the means of production to use them in accordance with a social plan, society puts an end to the former subjection of men to their own means of production.” In other words, socialism based on central planning and most importantly — a feature historically absent in 20th century socialist societies due to their premature appearance in economically backward conditions — planning democratically controlled and carried out by the working people themselves. The former alienating division of labor will be done away with as “society cannot free itself unless every individual is freed.”

Engels says that this is not just a “fantasy” or a “pious wish.” He maintains that the state of industrial development in the 1870s is so advanced that society could “reduce the time required for labour to a point which measured by our present conceptions, will be small indeed.” This figure needs to be actually quantified — but the point is all the goodies needed to live and thrive could be created with people just working a few hours a week and with no one being chained to any one boring and unsatisfying job. The growth in productivity since Engels’ day must make this even more true today.

Engels quotes Das Kapital: “The employment of machinery does away with the necessity of crystallizing this distribution [of labor-tr] after the manner of Manufacture, by the constant annexation of a particular man to a particular function. Since the motion of the whole system does not proceed from the workman, but from the machinery, a change of persons can take place at any time without an interruption of the work….”

Modern capitalism with its constant crises and dislocations of industrial centers and working people and financial catastrophes makes, Marx says, it necessary that we posit as a “fundamental law of production, variation of work” so that modern workers have to be ready to change jobs and learn new skills or leave the labor market. This disrupts lives and threatens widespread social disorder. Only socialist planning and a system that puts people before profits can prevent society from self destructing under the contradictions generated by the present capitalist world market which, in the name of profits first and people last, fragments both human individuals and their social relations with others which inevitably results from the private appropriation of socially created wealth.

Engels also says that the abolition of capitalism and the development “one single vast plan” which harmoniously “dovetails” industry and the means of production so that the differences between town and country are overcome is a prerequisite to overcoming environmental degradation and “present poisoning the air water and land.” To this must be added the current disaster of human induced global warming which simply cannot be dealt with as long as capitalism remains the dominant economic system. This problem was not seen in Engels’ day and now, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence of impending doom, the various capitalist powers are unwilling to take the drastic regulatory measures needed to deal with the problem.

Engels maintains that none of these claims he is making is “utopian” but that they are logical conclusions of scientific central planning and the abolition of the difference between town and country. It looks as if the towns, or rather the great cities (such as New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, etc., etc., will have be abolished as well! Engels says that it “is true that in the huge towns civilization has bequeathed us a heritage which it will take much time and trouble to get rid of.” But, “the great towns will perish.”

No, this is not Pol Pot, it is Frederick Engels and he is saying this because he envisions a complete redistribution of the population under socialism in order to get the “most equal distribution possible of modern industry.” So the abolition of the separation of town and country means the abolition of the cities. They must and will be eliminated “however protracted a process it may be.” This might just be a little too “utopian” and perhaps with the progress of science and communications since the 1870s, especially the growth of the internet, the contradictions between town and country can be resolved without offing the Big Apple.

In any event, leaving the abolition of cities aside, the point Engels wants to make is that Dühring’s view of socialism leaves out of account that building socialism will necessitate “revolutionizing from top to bottom the old method of production and first of all putting an end to the old division of labour.” Dühring thinks that the state can just take over production as is and harmonize it to people’s “natural appetites and personal capabilities.” He also thinks the division between town and country is natural and inevitable and has no plan for putting an end to the alienation and crippling of human capabilities that result from this division.

So much for Engels’ critique of Dühringian socialism’s handling of production. In the penultimate chapter of Anti-Dühring Engels will discuss the problems of distribution.

1. Anti-Dühring Part III Chapter III “Production.”
2. Engels is referring to an economic crises of the 1870s.

This month PM Press, the Oakland, CA. publisher founded by AK Press founder Ramsey Kanaan and others, is publishing Gilbert’s memoirs. The book, titled Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond, is certain to be included in the top tier of books having to do with the period of US history known as the Sixties. There is no self-pity within these pages, but lots of self-reflection. In what can only be considered a refreshing approach, Gilbert takes full responsibility for the path he has chosen and explains that path in an intelligently political manner and with a decidedly leftist understanding. Love and Struggle combines objective history, personal memory, and a critical perspective into a narrative that is at once an adventuresome tale and a political guide through the past fifty years.

Gilbert begins his story by describing his youth and his developing awareness that the United States was not what he had been led to believe it was. An Eagle Scout who believed the myths inherent in American exceptionalism, he was unprepared for the cognitive dissonance he underwent while watching the attacks by law enforcement on civil rights marchers in the US South. That sense of conflict deepened when he headed off to Columbia University. By 1965, angered by the US war on the Vietnamese and armed with a well-researched understanding of why the US was really involved there, Gilbert was organizing Columbia students to join antiwar protests. Like many of his contemporaries, by 1968 he was an anti-imperialist and working full-time against the war in Vietnam and racism in the United States. By 1969, he was one of the original members of Weatherman and by April 1970 he was underground.

Gilbert tells his story with a hard-learned humility. Occasionally interjecting his personal life–his loves and failures, his relationship with his family–with his political journey, it is the politics which are foremost in this memoir. A true revolutionary, every other aspect of Gilbert’s life is subsumed to the revolution. This kind of life is not an easy one. Indeed, it arguably makes the life of an ascetic monk look easy by comparison. After all, the monk is only trying to change himself, while the committed revolutionary wants to change the world into one where justice prevails; a world that by its very structure resists such change.

Love and Struggle carefully examines the history of the periods Gilbert has lived in. From the early days of the antiwar movement and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to the public street-fighting arrogance of early Weatherman; from Weatherman’s transition to the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) and its growing isolation from the New Left it was a part of; and from the post-Vietnam war US left to the Brink robbery and its aftermath, Gilbert keeps the politics front and center in his text. In his discussion of the period between Weather’s publication of its essential work Prairie Fire and its immediate aftermath, Gilbert provides an insight into the debates inside WUO and among its supporters in the years after the peace treaty was signed with northern Vietnam. His portrayal of the differences around theory being debated in the WUO serve as a broader description of the debates raging throughout the new left as the US intervention in Vietnam’s anti-colonial struggle neared its end. For those of us who were politically involved at the time, the debates ring with familiarity: national liberation over class; the interaction between race and class in the US; the oppression of women and white male privilege. In a testimony to his writing abilities, Gilbert’s discussion of the issues makes them as alive in this book as those arguments actually were in the mid-1970s. His keen political sense reveals the interplay between different political perspectives, understandings of history, and the always present contests of ego. The political arguments outlined by Gilbert (especially when describing the battle inside WUO) are still relevant today. Their echoes are present in the General Assemblies of the Occupy Wall Street movement and in forums more specific and less specific across the nation. Gilbert’s presentation of the essential WUO arguments that challenges the overriding role of class in the nature of oppression is not only reasoned and impassioned, it is worth studying and makes points useful to the future of anti-imperialist struggle in the United States Furthermore, the book includes an ongoing and excellent discussion of the nature of white supremacy and white skin privilege. For anyone who has spent time involved in the Occupy movement the past few months, the relevance of this latter discussion is all too familiar.

For those looking for a sensationalist account of life as a revolutionary or a confession, they should look elsewhere. David Gilbert’s memoir is a political account of a political life. Every action undertaken, every decision made is examined via the eye of a leftist revolutionary. This does not mean there are no page-turning moments in the book, however. Indeed, the sections describing Weather’s move underground and Gilbert’s daily life off the grid are interesting and revealing, as are those describing the attempts by WUO members to evade capture. The descriptions of Gilbert’s clandestine life and his subsequent moving back aboveground and then back under are also riveting.

Underlying the entire narrative is a current of what is best described as self-criticism; of Weather, the New Left, armed struggle and, ultimately, of Gilbert himself. As anyone who has experienced something akin to a self-criticism session can attest, such sessions can be emotionally wrenching episodes of retribution and petty anger. They can also be tremendously useful when conducted humanely. Gilbert’s written attempts at this exercise in Love and Struggle lean toward the latter expression while also providing interesting and useful considerations to the aforementioned issues (along with issues related to those criticisms). Gilbert’s realization that his ego occasionally caused him to make decisions that weren’t based on politically sound rationales is something any radical leader should take into account. In fact, Gilbert’s continuing struggle with his ego and it’s place in the decisions he made while free reminded me of a maxim relayed to me a couple times in my life; once by an organizer for the Revolutionary Union in Maryland and once by a friend from the Hog Farm commune. That maxim is simply: if you start believing that the revolution can’t exist without you, then it’s time to leave center stage and go back to doing grunt work where nobody knows (or cares) who you are. In other words, you are not the revolution so take your ego out of it.

In the well-considered catalog of books dealing honestly with the period of history known as the Sixties in the United States, Love and Struggle is an important addition. Borrowing his technique from memoir, confession, and objective history-telling, David Gilbert has provided the reader of history with the tale of a person and a time. Simultaneously, he has given the reader inclined to political activism a useful, interesting, and well-told example of one human’s revolutionary commitment to social change no matter what the cost.

The 1989 novel, titled The Third Reich, is the diary of a German office worker named Udo Bergen and his vacation in Spain. There is a girlfriend, a couple they meet, the hotel owner Frau Else, a man named Quernado who rents paddle boats to tourists and has grotesque burn scars on his body. The girlfriend leaves after a fright; the man in the couple drowns and the hotel owner’s husband is taken away to hospice with terminal cancer. The presence of a board game based on the second world war and also called The Third Reich hangs over the story like a surreal presence. Udo is an expert in board games based on World War Two and even makes extra money writing about strategies for different gaming magazines. For most of the book he and Quernado are engaged in a the Third Reich game. Udo is hoping that he can win as Germany while Quernado’s pieces represent the allies. It is as if the game is as real as life and life is only a game. Bergen even says to his game-playing friend Conrad upon his return from Spain: “We (are) all essentially ghosts on a ghostly General Staff.”

It seems that Quernado identifies Bergen as not only an opponent in the game, but as a potential embodiment of Nazi Germany itself. This is despite Bergen stating specifically to Quernado that he is much more of an anti-Nazi than any Nazi at all. Quernado ignores Bergen and plays the game as if he were fighting the war. Like much of Europe and certainly Germany, the fact of World War Two’s horrors defines everything, albeit in a rather murky manner. The game is nothing but a game except when it becomes more, as it does in the mind of Quernado. History has a similar trajectory. As long as it remains in books and museums (or games) it has little threat. It is when history becomes real that it constitutes something potentially more dangerous.

Like most of Bolano’s novels, The Third Reich comes across as if it were written in a detached fog. Although the narrator Bergen is part of every scene that occurs, his narration of the life he is in the middle of is simultaneously distant and intimate. Like fog, the closer one gets to the situation or person being described, the clearer Bergen’s tale become. Observations about the other characters in the novel are provided with an omniscience that, once considered, are mostly Bergen’s selfish perceptions. As one follows the interactions of the various characters in Bergen’s beach vacation, the egocentric nature of modern individuated society becomes apparent. Every single person portrayed lives alone amongst the crowd in the Spanish resort town. Relationships easily formed are just as easily dismissed. Friendships seem to be anything but that and love is barely more meaningful than renting a room.

Bolano is a master of style and story. The seemingly innocuous life of Udo Bergen the office worker and gamer is on second glance not what it appears. Death, sex, intrigue and the threat of violence simmer beneath the thin flesh of Bolano’s tale. After all is said and done little has changed. That is our curse. I am reminded of the line from Eliot’s The Waste Land: “Oed’ und leer das Meer.” Post industrial equals post-meaningful. Nothing plus nothing is still nothing. The charm is in the telling, not necessarily in the living. Bolano comprehends this fact and tells his story well.

Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America is a well-conceived and attractive book about the first weeks of the Occupy Wall Street movement that was recently published by the Left imprint Verso Books. It reads like a journal, except the entries are not from just one writer, but a collection of several. They range from the well-known like prison activist and Black Panther Angela Davis to a young activist named Manissa Mahawaral. Edited by a small group of occupiers and the editors of the journals n+1, Dissent, Triple Canopy, and The New Inquiry, this text primarily covers the scene at the Zurcotti Park encampment in Lower Manhattan where the Occupy Wall Street movement more or less began. Part diary and part reflection, some of its most compelling moments come when the younger occupiers write about various realizations they have during the course of the occupation.

My favorite anecdote of this type is from an activist involved in the Occupy movement in Oakland, CA. When she first began participating, she found the dislike of the police from certain members of the camp to be disturbing. After all, they too were part of the so-called 99%. However, after a few days in the camp and the violent police attacks on the Oakland camp and protests following the first raid on Oscar Grant Plaza, her understanding of law enforcement’s role in protecting the wealthy and powerful changed dramatically. “I am ashamed,” she writes. “I was so naive about the cops in Oakland, but even more than this I am furious… that the police are allowed to brutalize people….” It is moments like this where the Occupy movement becomes transcendent and more than the collection of individuals, groups and and encampments that it is. Interspersed throughout the book are a number of drawings and collages that are not only visually appealing but also clever statements about the essential issues involved.

The book is not just a collection observations from the frontlines. Also included are analyses of the economic reasons behind the movement from Left Business Observer editor Doug Henwood and a fascinating discussion of the history of the space where Occupy Atlanta was situated. This latter piece is also one of several pieces that discusses the role of people of color in the movement.

As one of the first of many books about the Occupy movement to be published, Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America sets a high standard. One hopes it is read by many, especially among those that couldn’t or didn’t make it to an Occupy camp before the State’s onslaught on them. This movement should not die.

Hot on the heels of the aforementioned book come OR Books addition. Titled Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America, this work covers similar ground to Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America. What it lacks in graphics, it makes up for in content. Written in a continuous narrative broken into chapters, Occupying Wall Street differs from the collection of vignettes contained in the Verso Books text, while also maintaining a more or less chronological telling of the original Zurcotti Park encampment from its beginning to its eventual destruction by the police on November 15, 2011. In addition, Occupying Wall Street spends more time placing the Occupy movement in the context of the international wave of protest that has swept from Greece to Britain to Tunisia and Egypt to the United States and a multitude of other localities around the globe.

Written by a larger collective of writers who modestly call themselves Writers for the 99%, the OR Books text functions as a description of life at Zurcotti Park and within the Occupy movement over the period noted above. If Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America is a journal of the Occupy Wall Street movement, then Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America is the literary equivalent of a wonderfully written diary. These two books are not exclusive to each other. in fact they are companion volumes that read together provide an engrossing and well-told description of one of the most hopeful protest movements to erupt in the capitalist world in decades.

The Young Lords Rise From the Pages

Speaking of attractive books to arrive recently on my bookshelf, the Haymarket Books reprint of the Young Lords 1971 book Palante: Voices and Photographs of the Young Lords, 1969-1971 certainly deserves a mention. The Young Lords Party was a revolutionary group of Puerto Rican youth that organized primarily among the young and working-class residents of New York’s Puerto Rican barrios during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Borrowing some of their style from the ideologically similar Black Panthers, this group was a dominant force in barrio politics during much of their existence. Their straightforward approach to solving some of the economic and political inequities in the barrio attracted thousands of supporters in the barrio and hundreds of powerful enemies in Christie Mansion and other edifices of power in New York. When I attended briefly attended Fordham University in the Bronx from Fall 1972 through Spring 1974 one of my smoking buddies was an active member of the group. His knowledge of Marxist theory was impressive as was his commitment to the struggle in the barrio. Needless to say, he and I had many intense discussions that taught me — as no book possibly could — the colonial situation of the Puerto Rican people and helped me unlearn years of misinformation about that island nation.

Palante is a history, explanation and discussion of the Young Lords Party from the perspective of its members in 1971. There is no bourgeois nationalism repeated in these pages. Instead, in the best tradition of other revolutionary nationalism, Palante argues that cultural and social freedom for the Puerto Rican nation is inseparable from economic freedom and a socialist revolution. For those uncertain of the difference, let me quote writer Earl Ofari from a 1969 article he wrote about the two phenomena as they relate to the black people of the United States :

“Revolutionary nationalists, unlike cultural nationalists, recognize that it is impossible to resolve the problems of black people under the structure of American Capitalism. This has led Huey Newton to correctly point out that one who adheres to the philosophy of revolutionary nationalism must of necessity be a socialist. For revolutionary nationalists, by and large, take the position that in order to oppose capitalism it is mandatory that one adopt an outlook of international working class solidarity with particular emphasis on the struggles of Third World people against Imperialism.”

The Young Lords believed the same analysis applied to the situation of the Puerto Ricans.

Looking at it today, the most striking aspect of this book is not the audacious (by today’s standards) writings calling for a revolution in the United States and an independent Puerto Rico. It is the collection of photographs. Difficult to pry one’s eyes away from, the photos herein rank up there with the best photojournalism has to offer. The struggles of the young revolutionaries and the people they worked with are evident in the faces on these pages and the places and actions set down in a darkroom forty years ago. The pride of a people realizing its power and the anger of that people realizing why and who has wronged it radiates from the stark black and white images that fill the last half of this beautiful work.

Friedman, who commands a $75,000 speaking fee (more than most Americans make in a year), wrote in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree that when he did his first column as the New York Times’ chief diplomatic correspondent in 1989:

I certainly did not know anything about most of the issues the senators were quizzing [Secretary of State James] Baker about, such as the START treaty, the Contras, Angola, the CFE (Conventional Forces in Europe) arms control negotiations and NATO…I couldn’t keep straight whether the Contras were our guys or their guys, and I thought the CFE was a typo and was actually ‘cafe’ without the ‘a’.

One could only hope that over the 20 years that followed, the foreign affairs columnist who once referred to himself as the newspaper’s paid “tourist with an attitude” and boasted of eating 14 Big Macs in 14 countries as one of the perks of his job, has acquired more intellectual depth.

It turns out, in Friedman’s case, that hoping for intellectual growth amounts to wishful thinking.

Fast forward a decade-and-a-half to July 2006. In an interview with the late Tim Russert on CNBC (watch video clip), Friedman not only revealed this not to be the case, but boasted, yet again, of not even knowing what he writes about or supports politically:

We got this free market, and I admit, I was speaking out in Minnesota—my hometown, in fact—and guy stood up in the audience, said, ‘Mr. Friedman, is there any free trade agreement you’d oppose?’ I said, ‘No, absolutely not.’ I said, ‘You know what, sir? I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade Initiative [sic]. I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.

While honesty is an admirable quality in any journalist, Friedman’s bravado combined with his intellectual incompetence and hostility towards the use of facts unveils an enormous amount of hubris. Friedman, despite admitting “he did not know anything about” most political issues of national and global importance, and not being able to recall the name of or knowing the contents of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), still believes he belongs in such a prominent perch covering these issues at “the paper of record.” To make matters worse, it has been reported that President Barack Obama has sought out Friedman for foreign policy advice concerning the Arab Spring.

The fact that this three-time Pulitzer Prize winner’s writing qualifies as serious, award-winning journalism and punditry is why Belén Fernandez latest book, The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work is such an important read.

Fernandez writes that the point of her book “is to demonstrate the defectiveness in form and in substance of [Friedman's] disjointed discourse, and in doing so offer a testament to the degenerate state of the mainstream media in the United States.”

Fernandez analyzes and critiques Friedman’s journalism and punditry using his columns from 1995 to the present, and his five books, with some additional material gleaned from select interviews and public appearances.

The Imperial Messenger is divided into three sections: America, the Arab/Muslim World, and The Special Relationship [U.S.-Israel]. The book’s conclusion compares the work of Friedman to Dr. Adrienne Pine, an anthropologist at American University in Washington D.C., who blogs at www.quotha.net and whose writing and opinion has appeared in a number of alternative media outlets.

Friedman, who Fernandez concludes relies on “clichéd feel good nationalism” and the “reduction of complex international phenomena to simplistic rhetoric and theorems that rarely withstand the test of reality” serves as the perfect vehicle for making such an indictment of the American mainstream media.

McJournalism

In The Imperial Messenger, Fernandez deftly reviews some of Friedman’s signature theories and policy prescriptions from past years, and evaluates how they’ve stood the test of time.

Take for instance his “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention” highlighted in The Lexus and the Olive Tree — a theory which Friedman stumbled upon as he “Quater-Poundered [his] way around the world”: no two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other. Sure, it’s got a certain ring to it, but never mind the facts: as Fernandez points out, Israel’s occupation and bombing of Lebanon, or NATO’s war against the former Yugoslavia. All of these states, together with the host of NATO members, are graced with the Golden Arches.

Freidman’s “Flat World Theory,” which he floated in his 2005 bestseller The World is Flat, was developed in collaboration with the vice president of corporate strategy at IBM. Friedman, who compares himself to Christopher Columbus for making this “discovery,” argues simplistically that globalization has leveled the playing field among people, countries and companies around the globe. The World is Flat was awarded the first annual £30,000 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

“The process of mutual aggrandizement in this case is straightforward,” writes Fenandez. “Friedman writes a book about globalization under the guidance of corporate executives, corporate executives hail book as blueprint for world, accolades propel Friedman’s fame to further reinforce elite power structures,” she writes. Friedman attributes his motivations to his professed desire to see “large numbers of people escape poverty”, evidence be damned.

Fernandez also notes that the same year when Friedman was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for “clarity of vision…in commenting on the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat,” he wrote a column called “ Crazier than thou,” in which he noted “No, the axis of evil idea isn’t thought through—but that’s what I like about it.”

“Crazier than thou” was a response to criticism from Chris Patten, the European Union’s Commissioner for External Relations at the time, of the Bush Administration’s “absolutist and simplistic” and “not thought through” lumping of Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an allied existential threat to world peace. Friedman goes on to suggest that Bush introduce these countries to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who’s “even crazier than you.” His assessment of Rumsfeld’s mental faculties is one of the few reasonable things he’s written. Friedman goes so far as to dismiss European and Arab concerns of civilian casualties in Afghanistan as “nonsense,” because according to him, Afghans would rather be blown up by our B-52′s than continue to live under Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

In 2009, Friedman compared Afghanistan to a “special needs baby” that the U.S., an unemployed couple, has decided to adopt. This “is merely one manifestation of a tradition of unabashed Orientalism that discredits Arabs and Muslims as agents capable of managing their own destinies and sets up a power scheme in which the United States and its military simultaneously occupy the positions of killer/torturer, liberator, educator, and parent/babysitter,” writes Fernandez.

Even when it seems it can’t get worse, it does. Friedman suggested that the Bush Administration should make Iraqis “ Suck. On. This” as compensation for 9/11 (which Iraq had nothing to do with). “We can only assume that haughty refrains of sexual-military domination find resonance among audiences seeking to defy feelings of individual and/or national inadequacy,” writes Fernandez. “It is meanwhile not clear why Friedman subsequently purports to be scandalized by the sexual military goings-on at Abu Ghraib.”

Friedman also once suggested that if the Serbs don’t acquiesce to NATO demands the population should be pulverized with a “ less than surgical” bombing campaign, and if necessary, militarily-“pulverize” the country back into the 1300s. It can be assumed that Friedman either never bothered to read the Geneva Conventions, or shares the Bush Administration’s view that they are irrelevant.

Friedman often has a penchant for contradicting himself. One strong example of his contradictory positions can be gleaned from two columns on Indonesia, written just a year apart.

In a May 1998 column, Friedman describes Suharto’s regime in Indonesia as “possibly the most corrupt regime in the world today,” an analysis that bordered on accurate, though is still a little euphemistic, especially in light of the US-backed dictator’s genocide against the Timorese. But a year later, in another column, Friedman chastised the US Congress for blocking the sale of fighter jets and US-training to Indonesia’s military because the country is “too complex to be a pariah.”

Other examples of Friedman’s pearls of journalistic and political skills pointed out by Fernandez include suggesting that Washington recruit the Russian mafia in the fight against Osama bin Laden, flooding Iraq with counterfeit money, or reducing his benign criticisms of Israel, a country he noted “had me at hello,” solely to its continued illegal settlement building.

“Friedman’s accumulation of influence is a direct result of his service as mouthpiece for empire and capital, i.e., as resident apologist for military excess and punishing economic policies,” writes Fernandez. This comes through in the following quote from The Lexus and the Olive Tree:

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U. S. Air Force F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

Fernandez’s The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work is a meticulously researched book, written with wry wit and an unrelenting critical eye, that should be read by both Friedman’s fans and critics alike; not just for what it reveals about his journalism or the New York Times, but for what it says about the state of American journalism as a whole. In short, if New York’s “paper of record” wanted to start rectifying its own journalistic deficiencies, it would do well to start by replacing Friedman with Fernandez.

Goldstone probably had no idea what awaited him. After the Mission published its findings and conclusions, the judge quickly became the victim of a vicious slander campaign. Israel’s Information Minister said that the Goldstone Report was “anti-Semitic.” Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz informed the listeners of Israel Army Radio that Goldstone was “an evil, evil man” and “an absolute traitor,” a “man who uses his language and words against the Jewish people.” Dershowitz later apologised for calling Goldstone a traitor, saying he thought the term moser (Hebrew for informer, delator) meant “monster” (as if that was any less harsh).

“I wrote to the broadcaster, retracting my word ‘traitor,’” Dershowitz told the Forward. “But if you’re asking me deep in my heart and soul do I believe that the word fairly characterizes him, in light of the way he’s used his Jewishness, both as a shield and a sword? You know, if the shoe fits.”

In the end, it all became too much for the South African judge. He’s tried to retract parts of the report he co-authored, along with publicly defending Israel against ‘the Apartheid Slander’. And if the truth be told it seems that has never disengaged himself from Zionism. However, the damage has already been done and the greater part of the Jewish community simply has no trust in him anymore.

I came to think of Goldstone’s destiny as I was reading Beyond Tribal Loyalties: Personal Stories of Jewish Peace Activists. The book is an anthology with contributions from 25 Jewish activists living in different parts of the world who have come to see the conflict from the Palestinian point of view. For most Jews, criticising Israel comes at a price – relatives and Jewish friends regard it as treason, they are accused of being self-hating, and in some cases even of paving the way for another Holocaust. But these stories are not mainly about the price they have to pay for their activism; it’s about their personal journeys that led them from being (in many cases) completely uncritical supporters of Israel and Zionism into defenders of Palestinian rights.

The book is edited by Avigail Abarbanel, a psychotherapist residing in the United Kingdom. Born in Israel in 1964, Abarbanel grew up in an abusive family and was—just like most other Israelis—completely blind to Palestinians and their suffering. Instead, Jewish suffering was the ubiquitous issue. During her school years the fear of another Holocaust was “repeatedly raised and debated” and she “was taught that everyone in the world, including Arabs, hated us just because we were Jews.” Even though Palestinians make up a fifth of Israel’s population she never understood who they were. She recalls:

I resented the Arab countries around us and our “enemy from within”—or the “fifth column” as the Palestinian citizens of Israel were sometimes called—that I thought wanted to “throw us into the sea”. I resented the world that didn’t seem to understand us and was against us all the time, for what I thought was no reason except our Jewishness. I didn’t understand why “they” couldn’t just leave us in peace. I thought the reason for our suffering, anxiety and insecurity was out there. Together with everyone else I felt hard done by, hassled and unsafe.

Abarbanel later left Israel for Australia, where she earned a degree in psychotherapy. As a student she was forced to scrutinise her past. This, along with reading The Iron Wall by Avi Shlaim, led her to renounce her Israeli citizenship and eventually reject Zionism altogether.

Ronit Yarosky was also unaware of who the Palestinians were. Her family left Montreal for Israel when she was 14 years old. She did her military service and was stationed in the West Bank. The Palestinian residents served as background actor – they were there, yet unimportant. West Bank cities and towns she stayed in as a soldier “were nameless to me because they were “only” Arab towns, and therefore of no significance in my life,” she remembers. Yarosky’s conversion began as she was working on her MA thesis back in Canada. It wasn’t until she read Benny Morris’s The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem that she realised that Jewish settlements were established on the ruins of Arab villages, and that her uncle was even living in a Palestinian house. When she brought this up with her mother, the latter replied: “Well, obviously.” But to Ronit the newly discovered facts was life-changing, and after she could no longer turn a blind eye to what is happening to the Palestinians.

For others like Peter Slezak, Zionism as such doesn’t appear to have been important in his childhood. As a Jew in Australia he felt as an outsider already in primary school. And with most of his relatives being Holocaust survivors, the Haggadah’s warning that “in every generation they [i.e. non-Jews] rise against us to destroy us….” can easily feel validated. Slezak, like many other Jews, used to worry that all non-Jews inevitably harbored anti-Semitic feelings, a worry that took many years to finally overcome. Instead of regarding the Holocaust as a crime against Jews and a proof of why a Jewish state is needed, he sees a universalistic message in Never again. Some Jewish friends have even cut all ties with Selzak, and he has in his own words ended up “becoming a pariah in my own community” because of his pro-Palestinian activism.

This culture of intolerance is well captured by American musician Rich Siegel when he describes himself as “a cult survivor.” There is something “very seriously wrong with Israel, and with the culture that supports it,” he writes. Siegel should know. He was an ardent Zionist as a teenager, even to the degree that he was out in the streets protesting Arafat’s appearance at the UN in 1974, this while singing along to lyrics such as “We’ll kill those Syrians.” For Siegel, the image of an innocent Israel threatened by Jew-hating Arabs first started to crack while waiting for his wife outside a train station in Rhode Island in 2004. A few activists had a book stand outside the train station and he perused Phyllis Bennis’s Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer. He was left shocked after reading about Jews massacring Arabs at Deir Yassin, something he had never heard of. He kept on reading books about the conflict and came to understood what Zionism represented. Some of his friends and relatives are no longer part of his life, but he has no regrets.

I have here only presented glimpses from some of the 25 contributions, but they all deserve to be read in full. As a non-Jew it is difficult too fully relate to the sacredness of the Jewish state. However, all people and cultures have their taboos that cannot be disrespected without running the risk of being questioned, persecuted or excommunicated. On a personal level, we all have inner demons holding us back until we have the courage to face them.

Hardly surprising, fear is a reoccurring theme in the stories. Zionism thrives on fears – fear of the Arabs who want to kill the Jews just because of who they are; fear of the non-Jewish world that doesn’t understand Jews because there’s an anti-Semite living in every Gentile. It is only by challenging and facing their fears that Jews can detach themselves from Zionism.

In the afterword Abarbanel writes that she struggled with finding a common denominator for all 25 contributors. But eventually she did find one thing they all share, which she terms “emotional resilience.” She defines it as “the ability to tolerate uncomfortable feelings without avoiding them or trying to make them go away,” and adds that it includes “the ability to tolerate the experience of being disapproved of, disliked and rejected by others, sometimes even by relatives and close friends.” In plain English: to have the courage to stand up for what you believe in no matter the cost.

This is what makes the book so inspiring. 25 stories written by people who struggle because they feel what they are not supposed to feel, because they do things they are not supposed to do. They have the emotional resilience and sense of justice that Richard Goldstone lacks.

There have been a number of books written about this underground press. The granddaddy of them all is most certainly Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press by retired Northwestern University professor Abe Peck, who began his journalism career as a member of Chicago’s groundbreaking Seed. More recent endeavors include John McMillan’s Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America and the just-released On the Ground: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S. Edited by Sean Stewart, On the Ground is essentially an oral history that features the recollections of several people that were involved with underground papers from around the United States. Unlike McMillan’s work which runs toward the academic side of things, Stewart’s text has a populist feel to it. The recollections are straight from the speakers’ mouths; sometimes angry, sometimes humorous and always honest.

The best part of the book are the graphics. As I read through the memories of the folks Stewart spoke with for On the Ground I was repeatedly surprised at how well I remembered various illustrations and photographs Stewart reprinted throughout the text. Like the papers his interviewees are remembering, the most striking thing about On the Ground is the layout. Even though I know the book was composed on a computer screen, the book looks as if it were laid out via the old cut and paste method by folks possibly stoned on weed and a day or two with minimal sleep–just like many issues of almost every paper Stewart discusses.

Being in the Movement and the counterculture was generally an upbeat experience. So was being in the Sixties underground media. Most folks were young and full of hope and those that were not necessarily young in years were where it counted–in their approach to life. Reporters did not cover stories as much as they took part in them and then wrote about it afterward. As Abe Peck says about working at The Seed: “We were very determined and unless something terrible happened–like [the murder of] Fred Hampton–up, just pretty upbeat.” Politics was omnipresent, whether it was at a very political paper like The Black Panther or a paper that had a more countercultural bent like The LA Free Press. This was because, as far as the authorities were concerned, everyone involved with the underground press–writers, printers, cartoonists, sellers and readers–were on the wrong side of the law and had to be watched. Sometimes, they were dealt with by methods legal and otherwise. This meant things like the stores selling papers being harassed by police and vigilantes; the withdrawal of advertising because of pressure from the FBI and other agencies; and assaults against persons involved by cops and others.

When Richard Nixon took over the White House in 1969 the repression of the Movement and counterculture intensified. Naturally, this meant that the media that represented these phenomena would be under greater attack. Black Panther papers were destroyed enroute to cities across the country and even to military bases overseas. Storefronts that newspapers worked out of were firebombed by vigilantes and shot at by police. Obscenity charges were brought against newspapers that then tied up the papers’ funds in court costs. High school underground press writers were thrown out of school and administrators suspended students selling and reading those papers. Although the reasons given for the expulsions usually had to do with attendance and other disciplinary infractions, the reality was that high school disciplinarians resented the threat to their authority and power. A friend of mine in Montgomery County, Maryland was suspended from the progressive John F. Kennedy High School for selling The Washington Free Press on campus. The issue in question featured a cartoon of a judge that had been involved in efforts to shut down the paper. The drawing showed the judge masturbating. Underneath the drawing was the phrase (made popular by the TV show Laugh-In) “here com da judge.” The cartoon was a response to a series of rulings made by the judge forbidding the distribution of the Free Press on high school grounds. These rulings and the school board decisions that preceded them were being challenged by the ACLU.

As the 1960s turned over into the 1970s, many folks that had been on the front lines began to retreat for the sake of their sanity. Others just fell into the trap of individualism and self-satisfaction–an easy trap to fall into in the US of A. By 1974 or thereabouts, the curse of identity politics had taken over much of the political discourse on the left and effectively limited the reach of the Movement as people separated according to their gender, sexuality, and ethnic origins. Intentionally or not, this trend hastened the demise of the underground press and the movements it was a part of. However, its legacy remains. There are many websites and even some print journals that are more than observers of the protests and movements they report on. Journalist Alice Embree notes that “The underground press was the connective tissue; it spread the news …” When the papers began to fail, the connectiveness was lessened. The underground press was a vital part of what happened in the sixties. Sean Stewart’s wonderfully edited text On the Ground lets the reader know how and why that remains true. The striking graphics and compelling recollections in this text are at once a popular history and an inspiration.

Recently I interviewed Christine about her new book, which details the plight of an Alaska Eskimo community struggling to save their land that is disappearing as a result of climate change.

Joshua Frank: Christine, what prompted you to investigate what is happening to the people of Kivalina?

Christine Shearer:  A few things. In 2007, I was part of this interdisciplinary research project at UC Santa Barbara, assessing the biggest “human impacts” to marine ecosystems. To do this we collected data from over a hundred scientists. And it really started to hit me how severe climate change is, particularly how quickly it is happening.

Also, I recently remembered this: we also went to get data from indigenous fishers, to include their traditional knowledge. So I went to a Native American reservation in the state of Washington and handed one of the fishers there this really complicated survey tool we had developed, and he was just kind of like, ‘What is this?’ And rather than fill it out, he walked me to the shoreline and showed me how the water was lapping at one of their buildings and said, ‘This is the biggest problem.’ He was talking about sea level rise.

And so one night I was in an environmental law class, and the teacher read a news headline about this lawsuit, this tiny Alaska Native village suing fossil fuel companies for damaging their homeland and creating a false debate about climate change, and I just knew I had to write about it.

JF: So you traveled up to visit these people? Can you tell us a little about their culture and history?

CS: They are Inupiat, tracing their ancestry to the northwest Arctic back thousands of years. They are fishers and whalers and live mainly off subsistence, and are pretty cued into the land and its rhythms, because they rely on it for their needs. So the changes in the Arctic have been pretty hard on them – making traveling and hunting more dangerous because the ice is thinning – let alone now that the small barrier island they are located on is eroding away.

I did not know much about the area before going, so I did a lot of reading in the Kivalina school library of their oral histories while there, and also asked questions. I was probably annoying, but they were always incredibly open and friendly, inviting me into their homes, happy to talk and share. When you think about how they live and have lived, it’s pretty amazing, and you can see how the strong social and community bonds would help them survive. The Arctic is not for wimps.

JF: You write about Kivalina’s grievances against ExxonMobil. What prompted it and where does the fight currently stand?

CS: Yeah, the reason the island is eroding is because of warming Arctic temperatures — sea ice now forms later and later in the year, leaving the shoreline vulnerable to erosion from storms. In 1992, Kivalina residents voted to move, and in 2003 and 2006, U.S. government reports said Kivalina had to be relocated within the next ten to fifteen years, due to erosion from warming temperatures.

Around the time of the government reports an environmental justice lawyer – Luke Cole – was working with Kivalina residents because their water was being polluted by a nearby mine. And that began the conversation about filing the climate change lawsuit, because Luke saw that the island was eroding, and the people had been trying to relocate for over a decade with little success or public attention.

So in 2008, Kivalina filed a public nuisance claim against ExxonMobil and 23 other large fossil fuel companies for their relocation costs. They also charged a smaller subset with conspiracy and concert of action for creating a false debate around climate change — Kivalina’s representation includes some lawyers that had been involved in both sides of the tobacco lawsuits.

In 2009 a judge dismissed Kivalina’s claim as a “political question” for the executive and legislative branches, and unsuitable for the judicial branch. The judge also denied Kivalina legal standing to bring the lawsuit. This meant that the secondary claims — which had to do with the climate change misinformation campaign — were thrown out without being commented on. The decision is being appealed, and Kivalina is waiting on that. In the meantime, they are still trying to relocate themselves.

JF: So who is actually to blame for what’s transpired in Kivalina? With the lawsuit against ExxonMobil, will you explain why are they being targeted here?

CS: Under public nuisance law, you can hold people or companies accountable that make a “meaningful” or “substantial” contribution to a harm. The 24 fossil fuel companies were chosen for being among the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters, while a smaller subset face claims of conspiracy and concert of action for going — in Luke Cole’s words — “above and beyond” in their efforts to try and mislead people about the science on climate change.

So, following the logic of the lawsuit: the companies are substantial contributors to the harm now facing Kivalina, and many of the companies knew of the harm they were creating, and tried to deal with it not by cutting back on emissions, but by misleading people to protect their business. Kivalina is therefore seeking damages – the cost of their needed relocation.

JF: Who is helping Kivalina relocate? What options do they have at this time to preserve their culture and integrity?

CS: There is no formal relocation policy in the U.S., and no U.S. government agency specifically tasked with helping communities relocate. So a lot of the efforts involved in trying to relocate have fallen on the people of Kivalina themselves, and they are working with different agencies at the federal, state, borough, and tribal levels to try and coordinate a relocation. Many government workers are doing what they can for Kivalina, like building a seawall, but they can only act within their prescribed roles and boundaries, which are becoming outdated with climate change.

The Government Accountability Office has recommended that a U.S. government agency be tasked with relocation — I think that would help Kivalina out immensely. But now you have Congressional representatives who don’t “believe” in climate change and are trying to cut funding for adaptation and even disaster management, which is incredibly dangerous.

JF: Is the Kivalina situation an anomaly, or is this something that is happening in other locations of the world as well, where people may also be displaced as a consequence of global warming?

CS: I think Kivalina is an anomaly in the sense that most of the discussion around the biggest impacts of climate change are usually focused on the Global South. Kivalina offers an example of how Alaska Natives in the U.S. are being heavily impacted as well, and also face inadequate resources and assistance.

But, yes, people around the world face displacement. There seems to be two types of impacts from climate change. One is the steady threat of displacement, like the people of Kivalina and other Alaska Natives facing erosion and flooding, and the small island states — although I used to think of the threat of erosion as slow, but now realize it can be quick and sudden, putting people in danger. The other type of impact is the increase in the number and severity of “extreme” weather events, like increased droughts, fires, and flooding, which may also make previously inhabited places unlivable, and cause migrations.

JF: What would you tell those who want to get involved in the issue? How can people reach out to the folks in Kivalina?

CS: Yeah, a reduction on greenhouse gas emissions — mitigation — is still very important, but communities like Kivalina show we also need to focus on adaptation policies.

I think the most important thing for Kivalina is that a government agency is tasked with relocation, and a relocation policy is put into place. This will give the people of Kivalina a blueprint for what to do and what they can do. The groups Native American Rights Fund and Three Degrees Warmer are trying to streamline the process of relocation, while human rights lawyer Robin Bronen is trying to institute a relocation policy at the international level grounded in human rights law – climigration. There might be more efforts out there. These groups could use help and support.

Also, we need to communicate to our political representatives that cuts in disaster management and adaptation — which are currently being debated — are unacceptable. The answer is smart policy, not none at all. Climate change is here, and we have to deal with it.

Fortunately there is a book, Against the Wall: The Art of Resistance in Palestine by William Parry, that pictorially deflates monopoly media disinformation and complicity.

Against the Wall indisputably drives home the dispossession, brutality, racism, and oppression that one group — Israeli Jews — inflicts daily on another group — Palestinians.

Although text accompanies the evocative photographs, the photos speak for themselves. Against the Wall depicts Palestinian families being separated from one another, being prevented from tending to their crops, Israelis inflicting economic deprivation on Palestinians, Israelis targeting of school children, and Israelis intended humiliation of Palestinian workers passing through checkpoints in the wall.² Against the Wall reveals the spirit, art, and determination of the Palestinian resistance, the anger of the occupied people, messages to the world, etc.

One message reads, “The only peace Israel wants is a piece of my land.” Given the de-Arabization of East Jerusalem and the growing Jewish colonies in the West Bank, in contravention of Israel’s obligations under the Oslo Accords, and given that the Wall (deemed illegal by the World Court) encroaches inside the Green line from the 1967 War further stealing Palestinian land³ — there is no denying the truthfulness of the message. This has not caused the US government to stop giving $3 billion+ a year to an OECD member (historically an economically elitist grouping of states) that openly engages in the occupation and the siege of an indigenous people.⁴

Usually when there is an occupation, and especially when that occupation is oppressive, there is resistance. Much of the artful resistance and messages on the Wall come from non-Palestinians, and Parry acknowledges that not all Palestinians support the wall being used as a medium for artful resistance. Parry relates an exchange between British street artist Bansky, who supports the Palestinian resistance, with a Palestinian elder:

OLD MAN: You paint the wall, you make it look beautiful.
BANSKY: Thanks.
OLD MAN: We don’t want it to be beautiful. We hate this wall, go home.

Against the Wall answers the question: what does occupation, apartheid look like? It appears somewhat like a coffee table book. Unlike the usual coffee table book, however, the photos and text in Against the Wall convey a message of grave importance. It is a book hard to put down. One can stare at the photos for long periods of time and return again to the photos a short while later. It is not a book that is read and placed on a shelf. It invites you back time and again. Against the Wall should be on the coffee tables, in the libraries, and on the gift lists of every person who cares about human rights for all humans.

Where words — despite their sincerity, truthfulness, and morality — alone cannot convince, the pairing with authentic photography creates a vividly more powerful impact. That is Against the Wall. Get this book and share it!

1. Yes, supporters. If one is actively against non-violent resistance to occupation and oppression, then one is undeniably supporting the aims of the occupiers.
2. I write “intended humiliation” because, in fact, it portrays the dignity of Palestinian workers who day-in and day-out withstand the indignities to support their families – an honourable act – and it is rather a self-humiliation for the Israelis that people in positions of power would lower themselves to behave so inhumanely to other humans.
3. If land acquired through violence is wrong, and unless the United Nations has a moral right to dispossess peoples of their homeland, then arguably all the land of Israel and Palestine is Palestinian land. This principle holds for all lands acquired through violence, including Canada, the United States, etc.
4. Although preponderantly responsible for helping Israel maintain its occupation, the US is not alone, as many western states, and Arab dictators are complicit in the occupation of Palestine.

So how to define an intellectual? An intellectual is someone who thinks beyond the strictures imposed by upbringing, education, societal norms, dominant media, etc. to arrive in agreement with other conclusions or to form one’s own conclusions. It is more than simply thinking outside a box or applying critical thinking to issues and challenges because intellectuality also demands honesty and integrity.

Gilad Atzmon is someone who encompasses what it means to be an intellectual. He is someone seemingly unbound by a specific group or milieu. Atzmon turned away from the Zionism of his father and the – what he calls — Nazism of his fellow Jews in Israel. Atzmon recalls the plight of captured Palestinian freedom fighters at the Ansar internment camp during his time in the Israeli military: “The place was a concentration camp. The inmates were the ‘Jews’, and I was nothing but a ‘Nazi’.” He has discarded the scoundrel’s refuge of patriotism. He has rejected what is morally anathema inculcation, propaganda, mendacious narrative, and supremacism of Jewish “culture.” Atzmon realizes that we all are human beings; we all possess 23 pairs of chromosomes.

Atzmon exposes a twisting of history, a narrative that lies about who the Jewish people are, lies about a historical and contemporary dispossession, occupation, and oppression carried out by his kinsfolk. That is an exceedingly difficult dilemma for most people to recognize, acknowledge, and overcome. It is especially difficult to fight because when such a colossal crime is denied, whether consciously or through gullibility, by the masses of one’s kinsfolk (Atzmon states: “Israel is largely supported by world Jewry institutionally, financially and spiritually.”), it estranges one from one’s tribe.

Atzmon has written The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics wherein he answers the titular question. Atzmon is interested in identity: who are the Jews? He differentiates “between Jews (the people), Judaism (the religion), and Jewish-ness (the ideology).” Jews, Atzmon notes, do not form an ethnicity. He describes Jewish society as an amalgam. It is assimilationist for Jews and separatist from Goyim.

The Jews and the Jewish state come first for Zionists. Atzmon details how financial, economic, and political control are sought. He cites “the first and prominent Zionist prophet Theodor Herzl” as to “what political Zionism is all about: getting superpowers to serve the Zionist cause.” The abject speech by US president Barack Obama rejecting Palestinian statehood is a prime example of serving Zionism.

He cuts through the hasbara: “For most Israelis, shalom doesn’t mean ‘peace’, it means security, and for Jews only.”

When it comes to history, Atzmon seeks truth even when it is ugly. Like any good scientist or historian, Atzmon believes a theory or narrative that has been disproven is one that should be disregarded for a superior explanation. Historical revisionism for Atzmon is part of the search for the closest approximation to the truth. When a clearer picture emerges of history, then amending the narrative to reflect the new facts and clearer picture is demanded.

The narrative is important, and many Jews are highly skilled in discourse. Atzmon writes that Zionists realised that full control over language would allow them to impose their worldview on subsequent generations of Jews. Israel Shamir in his book, Masters of Discourse, illuminated how pervasive the Jewish narrative is in many societies.

But the Jews are not always so clever in their attempts to control the message. Atzmon relates how the IDF prevented all foreign media from entering Gaza, not to propagandize the Goyim but to keep Israelis and Zionist Jews from seeing themselves through the eyes of the Goyim. Atzmon describes this approach as “completely countereffective”: “the Israelis ended up seeing themselves through the gaze of Arabs, Iranians, Muslims. … Humiliated and pulverised, Israelis saw their true nature exposed.”

Atzmon explains, “… it is not the idea of being unethical that torments Israelis and their supporters, but the idea of being ‘caught out’ as such.”

Atzmon identifies a hypocrisy in Jews identifying as Jews. “Some Jews,” he writes, “may, for instance, proudly carry the Jewish banner (Jews for Peace, Jews for Justice, Jews for Jesus and so on) as if they believe that the ‘J’ word contains special righteous attributions. However, they will also be gravely offended if they are called a ‘Jew’ by others. Suggesting to a Jew that ‘he is a Jew’ or ‘behaves like a Jew’ can be regarded as a serious ‘racist’ offence.”

Jews for Peace exemplifies Jewish separation. However, as for offensive labeling, context is important. When the speaker is equating group membership with a negative attribute and stereotyping all members with that attribute (although untrue), then that is indeed a racist offense and umbrage at such labeling is warranted.

Wondering about Atzmon

Atzmon knows who he is: “I regard myself a ‘Hebrew-speaking Palestinian’, I do not seek anyone’s approval to do so. I also regard myself as a ‘proud, self-hating Jew’ and again, I do not need anyone’s approval.”

Why does Atzmon describe himself as a self-hating Jew? He does not hate himself, but he hates what being a Jew – to him — represents, especially a Zionist Jew: “ Zionism is all about the abolition of the other, the re-creation of conditions in which Jews can celebrate their symptoms, in which they can love themselves for who they are – or, at least, who they think they are.”

It is not just the message that Jews manipulate, according to Atzmon, but also the economic system. Atzmon cites Milton Friedmann who made it clear: “Jews do benefit from hard capitalism and competitive markets.”

In fact, again citing Friedmann, Jews were never about sharing and caring economies and their ideologies: “Jews or Jewish intellectuals are not really against capitalism, it was just the ‘special circumstances of the nineteenth century that drove Jews to the left, and the subconscious attempts by Jews to demonstrate to themselves and the world the fallacy of the anti-Semitic stereotype’. It was neither ideology nor ethics.”

How does one understand a people without a history? Atzmon says, “It is an established fact that virtually no Jewish history texts were written between the first and early-nineteenth centuries. That Judaism is based on a religious historical myth may have something to do with this.”

Atzmon dispenses with biblical fiction — “an ideological text that is being made to serve social and political ends” and the mythical exile of Jews (citing the work of Israeli historian Shlomo Sand).

The Wandering Who? examines the political landscape, wondering about the “overwhelming” overrepresentation of Jews in the political institutions of the United Kingdom and United States. This is a fact, but should one blame Jews for taking advantage of the political system and the voting tendencies of the citizenry? Politics in western so-called democracies is, after all, about forming groups that can gain political power.

Atzmon criticizes the leaders in the UK and US, asking: “And what qualifications did [Tony] Blair or [George W.] Bush possess before taking the wheel?” Atzmon supplies the answer: “none.” He continues, “Our lives, our future and the future of our children are in the hands of ludicrous, clueless characters.” Here Atzmon digresses weakly and too far from his core thesis. Ad hominem should be unpersuasive in intelligent discourse, and Atzmon fails to address what are the qualifications that Bush and Blair lack; what qualifications does Atzmon propose are necessary?

In a speech arguing against Palestinian statehood, United States president Barack Obama said: “There is no shortcut to the end of a conflict that has endured for decades…” Atzmon demurs: “… the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be resolved in 25 minutes once both people decide to live together.”

However, according to Atzmon, “The only people who can bring peace about are the Palestinians, because Palestine, against all odds and in spite of the endless suffering, humiliation and oppression, is still an ethically-driven ecumenical society.”

The Wandering Who? reveals the infatuation with self and the Jewish struggle for identity; it presents a reasoned and principled account into understanding the mentality of an occupier and oppressor.

Hedges is writing about, and scolding, a class he is a member of; his moral outrage is probably systematized in his own mind by a conceptual framework learned earlier in the Christian ministry (he is the son of a preacher and went to divinity school, similar to MLK, Jr.), and his smooth populist style of presentation (topical, not overly deep, like Rev. Bill Moyers) was honed in his career as a journalist (war correspondent).

My wife recommended the book, which she got from our public library (it’s pricey). Hedges has put the basics of the leftist (socialist/environmentalist) message into an easily digestible form of modest proportion. The good of this is that it should have wider appeal.

I have no strong criticisms of Hedges’ book since I can see my version of his same thoughts throughout most (but not all) of it. One might criticize the fact that Hedges does not conclude with any practical action a motivated reader could take to change the national politics described. Hedges is presenting “the vision thing” to a wide audience; he may urge us to revolt, but this is purely rhetorical (and, in fact, leads into a discussion of revolt as attitude, taken from Camus, which I, myself, have done in my writing).

For regular (and friendly) readers of CounterPunch (CP), there would be no new lessons in political theory or political philosophy in Hedges’ book, though one might certainly pick up any number of interesting tidbits and connections — Hedges is a highly educated, well connected, and experienced observer; also, imbued leftists would not gain any tactical practicalities from Hedges. But, such leftists might enjoy, or find it interesting, to read a sincere and yet breezy longish essay (not a big book) that reflects their sentiments, and ‘mainstreams’ their overall point of view.

Hedges concludes his book with a good deal of pessimism, seeing the dawning (or even later on the first day) of an anticipated dark age in American life. I agree that skepticism toward the idea of progress is appropriate, given the evidence of recent history, but I also think it a mistake to believe we are necessarily doomed (or alternatively, destined to be “saved”) by some form of historical determinism: people could think and act differently, as a unified society, to change the present trends and to aim at different political economies. How to activate that “could” throughout American society is the nub of the leftist problem.

Hedges describes why he is led to his concluding pessimism, so the book’s ending can be a useful point of departure for other analysts and critics. Why or why not to worry; and what to do and how, are open to discussion. And this is true of nearly everything written as political criticism from the left.

I thought of writing a thorough review of Death of the Liberal Class, but I can’t convince myself CP-type readers would really care about such a review, since for them the book could only be at most a reflection of their own thinking (with no theory lesson, no practical recipes), though nicely expressed. (Actually, the thought that whatever I might write would likely be pointless as advocacy, has becalmed that activity: we are living in times of faith and omniscience.)

I suspect a large part of Hedges’ pessimism comes from his self-realized redundancy, and this is something I can understand. Hedges knows himself to be a liberal (like a European “social democrat”, I would think) whose capabilities, education, and advantageous circumstances have granted a comfortable life by the publication of his thoughts, and elevated him beyond the working classes. But he and his peers of similar type in elite social circles (note the people he interviews, among them Chomsky, Finkelstein and Nader) are totally ignored by both the working classes (“consumers”, the widest public) and the political management class, in the crafting of national policies. To most Americans, Hedges and his ilk are boutique, marginal froo-froo. Hedges and those who think like him are drowning in a rising tide of indifference to the decay of civic virtue.

Death of the Liberal Class is a lament with recriminations, written as one man’s extended political epitaph of his own social function.

Early makes a solid case for democratic unions, ending the book with a call for rank-and-file controlled unions as the superior choice over corporate-style, top-down unions.

The vast majority of workers would agree with Early’s prescription, and in a democratic society, it would be a done deal. However, as with most matters under capitalism, the majority get no choice.

The major weakness of Civil Wars is that it doesn’t explain why a generation of activists failed to democratize the unions and what the next generation of activists must do differently to avoid repeating that failure.

Early does a fine job of explaining who did what to whom in meticulous detail, but he fails to locate these details in an accurate historical context.

Early describes how, after the decline of the social movements in the 1970s,

“…thousands of veterans of anti-war activity, the civil rights movement, feminism, and community organizing migrated to workplaces and union halls with the professed goal of challenging the labor establishment… the largest radical presence in the unions since the 1930s, when members of the Communist Party and other left-wing groups played a key role in the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).” (p.1-2)

Unfortunately, the 1970s was not the 1930s, and the New Left was not the Communist Party.

The 1930s followed the crash of 1929. The Great Depression created mass deprivation and the economic boom in the Soviet Union gave credibility to communists in the labor movement. The link between the labor movement and the socialist movement was key to the rise of industrial unions in America.

In contrast, the 1970s followed decades of economic expansion that enabled a sizable union bureaucracy to develop. And while the 1960s generation was radicalized by the fight for Civil Rights and the US war in Vietnam, the twin legacies of McCarthy in America and Stalin in the Soviet Union had driven socialists out of the unions and discredited the revolutionary left.

While mass movements won real gains for the working class in the 1960s, the capitalist class regrouped during the 1970s and launched a broad-based class war to regain lost ground. Cut off from the socialist tradition, the New Left was unable to counter the assaults of the capitalist class and the conservatism of the union bureaucracy.

As Early points out, the employers’ offensive was fierce and unrelenting. Companies laid off workers, attacked unions and demanded concessions. Governments of both parties supported this assault by eroding labor standards, deregulating industries, privatizing social services and supporting job migration.

The union bureaucracy was used to a more friendly terrain on which it could negotiate wages and benefits. It recoiled from the prospect of fighting an all-out class war that challenged the right of the capitalists to profit at workers’ expense.

Despite the escalating attacks, union leaders continued to uphold their end of a social contract that no longer existed. They accepted employers’ demands for concessions, no matter how deep, in the hope that once profitability was restored, they would regain lost ground. However, the employers continued to demand concessions, even as the economy boomed and profits soared.

Workers who fought back were fired, and combative unions were decertified. With a few notable exceptions, strikes were defeated, union drives failed and workers became demoralized. The proportion of workers in unions sank into the single digits.

In the face of such defeats, why have union bureaucrats consistently refused to fight? Early provides the usual liberal explanation – that union leaders are simply wedded to the wrong strategy.

A class analysis reveals something different.

The union bureaucracy cannot lead the fight against the employers, not because of wrong-headed ideas, but because the bureaucracy occupies a managerial or middle-class position between capital and labor. Its continued existence depends on the continued exploitation of union members and its role in negotiating the terms of that exploitation. The union bureaucracy cannot challenge capitalism without threatening its own existence, so it must promote conciliation.

The capitalist class understands the true nature of union officialdom. Over the past four decades, employers have relied on the compliance of union leaders to drive down the living standards of the entire working class.

Despite their passivity, union bureaucrats could not allow their membership base to disappear because they need members’ dues to sustain their elevated social position and lavish lifestyles. They couldn’t rally union members to fight the employers without compromising their own middle-class position, so the only other option was to advance themselves at their members’ expense.

To their everlasting discredit, top union officials adopted the capitalist model of turf wars, takeovers and amalgamations. Embracing this ‘compete or die’ strategy, each set of union bureaucrats fought to increase its market share, that is, to grow its own union at the expense of other unions and the labor movement as a whole.

Civil Wars describes in great detail the corruption, back-stabbing, power-grabbing, opportunistic alliances that have marked these turf wars among American unions.

Early explains how the corporate model of organizing was presented as a means to advance workers’ interests (“justice for all”) when it was actually fought at their expense. Millions of dollars in members’ dues and countless union-hours were squandered on lawyers, consultants, politicians, smear campaigns, court battles, settlements, and security forces – not to fight for workers’ rights but to battle other unions and to dominate the rank and file.

The struggle for better contracts, for Medicare-for-all and for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act were all sacrificed to expand the control of high-paid union bureaucrats.

Civil Wars documents how difficult it was to transform unions into power bases for a self-serving bureaucracy. Standing in the way were militant union locals and rank-and-file activists who rely on their unions to defend them at work.

Applying the most disgusting tactics, bureaucrats used members’ dues to finance an attack on any local and any militant who fought for democratic control of their union.

The many were sacrificed to benefit the few. This is the social dynamic of capitalism – a word that does not appear in Early’s book, but is key to any real understanding.

During the Cold War, capitalism severed the link between the cause of labor and the fight for socialism. This link has never been rebuilt, and this explains the sorry state of the US labor movement today.

The tradition of socialism as democratic working-class control was rediscovered too late in the 1960s. When capital launched its war against the working class, the revolutionary left was too small and inexperienced to counter it. With the unions in retreat and the working-class demoralized, the left split.

One segment of the left, to which Early belongs, “went into unions to change the balance of power between labor and capital by first changing power relationships within unions themselves.” (p.16)

The other segment worked to build a base on college campuses in the hope of being able to inject revolutionary politics back into the labor movement when it rose again.

How successful were these strategies?

From the abundance of evidence in Early’s book, we can conclude that the dedication, hard work and personal sacrifice of union activists is an insufficient social force, on its own, to counter the combined power of the capitalist class and the union bureaucracy. Labor militants need the political support of a revolutionary socialist movement.

Sadly, but inevitably, socialist organizations that built a base on campuses became dominated by middle-class academics and professionals who offer abstract, not real, leadership. And they continue to wait for the labor movement to revive.

We can be certain that capital will continue to assault labor, and workers will continue to defend their rights. Whether workers prevail will depend on the extent to which they develop socialist consciousness and socialist organization. When the working class is on the ascendance, this can happen spontaneously. When the class is on the defensive, workers need the intervention of socialists to show them what they are capable of achieving.

Our most urgent task is to reconnect the labor movement with the socialist tradition. For this to happen, labor activists need socialist politics and socialist organizations must reconstitute themselves to place those who lead in the workplace in the leadership of the organization.

Instead of using his knowledge and experience to rebuild the vital link between the cause of labor and the struggle for socialism, Early attacks it. In the final chapter, he promotes the most vulgar anti-Marxism, equating the victory of the workers’ state in Russia under Lenin with its crushing defeat under Stalin.

Like other books that address the state of US labor (Solidarity Divided, Labor in Trouble and Transition), Civil Wars rejects a political solution to the class war in favor of reforming ‘the house of labor.’ As Early documents so well, this strategy has failed in the past. And it will continue to fail because political problems cannot be solved by economic means.

Unions are organizations of economic defense. No matter how well they work together (and their jurisdictional divisions prevent this) unions cannot lead the class because they must represent every worker in the bargaining unit, regardless of those workers’ political views. And capitalism is highly effective in convincing workers to adopt political views that conflict with their class interests.

The two key lessons that flow from Early’s book are ones that he ignores.

The working class must organize separately from other classes, especially from the middle-class union bureaucrats and the middle-class professionals who dominate the social movements. Only by organizing separately can the working class become strong enough to make tactical alliances with other classes.

The working class needs its own independent political party, a revolutionary socialist organization that is dedicated to winning the class war against capital by bringing the working class to power.

I agree with his depiction of the utter immorality of Zionist dispossession and occupation of Palestinians. However, I know from our previous conversations that we differ markedly on the Canadian state’s dispossession of its Original Peoples.

He is the author of The Host and the Parasite and his latest book is Exploding Middle East Myths: 15 Years of Fighting Zionist Propaganda. Exploding Middle East Myths reveals that Zionists formed common cause with Nazis, disabuses the notion that all Jews are Semites and historically tied to a Holy Land, argues that Hamas is a legitimate resistance, portrays Israel as rejectionist, describes how Israel fought the 1967 War on pretext, details how the United Nations Partition Plan is without UN Security Council approval, and hence, Israeli statehood is dubious,¹ especially relevant given that Palestine is currently seeking recognition of its statehood in the UN, which would seem a concomitant outcome of Jewish statehood.

Kim Petersen: You reveal many myths about Israel and Palestine. Why are such myths not more widely known, and how can the genuine facts be made more widely known?

Greg Felton: These myths aren’t widely known because they are actively censored in our schools, universities and media. The subjugation of Palestine is so intricately bound up with deeper, official beliefs about the treatment of Jews under the Third Reich and the creation of Israel that a rational investigation of the subject would necessarily expose these beliefs as fraudulent. So much of our power structure owes its existence to these beliefs that the lies they harbour must be defended at all costs.

Unless we debunk these false beliefs, we will continue to be enslaved by them. The best way to do this lies in reading and supporting independent media, and challenging historical fallacies as much as possible. That’s why the Internet is the last bastion of free speech. Of course, net neutrality is under attack from armies of myth defenders.

KP: You wrote, “For the U.S., aiding and abetting Israel’s subjugation of Palestine and its neighbours supplanted oil security as the prime determinant of Middle East policy from 1980 onward. In the services of this foreign entity, the U.S. government freely squandered, and continues to squander, American lives, resources and self-respect.” You conclude the United States is not in control. If this is the case, why do you think the US government relinquished control?

GF: The U.S. did not “relinquish control” in any formal sense; the country was subverted from within by the Israel Lobby. This is the thesis of my first book The Host and the Parasite—How Israel’s Fifth Column Consumed America. Without recapitulating the entire book, a shorthand answer traces this subversion to 1980, when the U.S. public voted for religion over reason. Under President Ronald Reagan, Zionist Jews would infiltrate policy-making levels of government and proliferate like a cancer. When combined with the growing constellation of influential propaganda “think tanks” like AEI and WINEP, Zionists and evangelical Christians proceeded to turn the U.S. into a servant of Israel. Congress is now so thoroughly colonized that it cannot act in the U.S. interest.

KP: You state that myths used to prop up ideologies and false histories will ultimately tear a country apart. If true, should this deter the use of myths for ulterior goals? Given that the Zionists are creating facts-on-the-ground, could it not be that such myths will ultimately secure that dispossessed from others? And since some Zionists have been forthcoming about the dispossession (as Exploding Middle East Myths gives ample examples of), why do you believe it will tear Israel apart?

GF: If all Jews in Israel were rabid Zionists, I might agree, but the illusion of Israel as a legitimate, democratic country is at odds with its behaviour. Every country needs to have a governing ethos in which all citizens can see themselves. The disconnect between theory and practice, once deniable during the Cold War and the farcical Oslo “negotiations,” is now unbridgeable. Israel is now reduced to repudiating any pretence to democracy and even attacking Jews who support democracy and right for Palestinians. If Israel purports to be a Jewish state, it cannot long continue to be a living contempt of that idea.

KP: You apparently are against the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. You say that many Iranians consider him to be a “needlessly provocative buffoon.” You accuse him of something that many people would accuse you of: “anti-Israel bombast.” What is the difference between your opposition to Israel and that of Ahmadinejad?

GF: In fact, I support Ahmadinejad. He is a rational, well-spoken man who understands the Middle East better than most Westerners. Many Iranians may find him unnecessarily provocative, but I don’t. Our attitudes toward Israel are, in fact, similar but by no means could I be called bombastic or buffoonish. My writing is carefully researched and even my detractors cannot find fault with my facts. That’s why they have to resort to character assassination. My writing may at times be theatrical and satirical, but only a Zionist would dismiss it as bombastic.

KP: You criticize James Petras for not having looked at the 2009 Iranian elections from the “public’s point of view.” To substantiate this claim, you cite Richard Haass from the Council on Foreign Relations (arguably, an extreme establishment organization). With all due respect, I found such reasoning uncompelling, comparing the sources. Why should the views of the CFR be believed over that of Petras?

GF: I did not cite the views of the CFR. I cited a view that belonged to Richard Haass. It does not matter to me in the least who a person is or what agency he may belong to. All that matters is the accuracy and believability of the argument. If we judge the accuracy of an argument based on the arguer’s résumé or political affiliation we “credentialize” truth and fall into irrationality.

KP: You compare the “official” narrative of 9-11 to the Iranian government’s reactions to the protests of the 2009 elections and conclude that “it is logical to conclude that Ahmadinejad’s election might well be a fraud.” With all due respect, my logic did not come to such a conclusion. Second, you asked how an economist, Mark Weisbrot, “deemed himself competent to write on Iranian politics.” So I respectfully inquire how do you deem yourself more competent to write on Iranian politics than Weisbrot?

GF: I do not deem myself more competent than Wesibrot to write on Iranian politics. He may in fact be competent, but he gave no sign of it in his analysis of the Iranian election. In short, he had no evidence to back up his charge that the election was legitimate. He resorted to the same lazy guesswork that defenders of the official narrative of Sept. 11 did. Instead of making a case, he hides behind the hypothetical mood. To give the illusion that it was logistically impossible. “Indeed, if this election was stolen, there must be tens of thousands of witnesses—or perhaps hundreds of thousand—to the theft. Yet there are no media accounts of interviews with such witnesses.” An honest arguer cannot deny the validity of a cause by denying its effect, yet that is what Weisbrot did, and what numerous apologist for the official narrative of Sept. 11 do.

Regarding Petras, he offers no evidence to support his claim that Ahmadinejad’s opponents were pro-Western, or that there are Western protégés in Iran. Mir-Hossien Mousavi, who many argue really won the election, is in fact more liberal, but he is not about to undo the Islamic nature of Iran. Petras’s arguments seemed more reflexive than researched.

KP: You note that in 1947 the United Nations voted to establish an Arab and Jewish state in Palestine. Given that it has already been established by a UN vote, what effect do you think this will have on the current Palestinian attempt for UN re-recognition of statehood?

GF: First of all, the UN did not establish Israel. That is a popular myth. The 1947 Partition Plan that ostensibly carved out a Jewish State out of Arab Palestine was never ratified in the Security Council, and therefore does not exist. Israel has never had legal, moral or political legitimacy, and this is the reason that Israel and its client states are so desperate to sabotage UN recognition of Palestinian statehood. Inasmuch as the Partition Plan was illegal—the UN has not right to take land from one people to give it to another—there was much reference made to an Arab state. The very idea of partition implies two parts, yet Israel has never recognized Palestine’s right to exist. To do so would expose the utter criminality, not only of the incessant Jewish colonization, but the illegitimacy of Israel itself. As I said in my first column on this topic: “We can have peace in the Middle East or we can have Israel; we cannot have both.”

KP: You write that overseas media like BBC, the Guardian, Al Jazeera (the latter accused by many critics of disinformation abetting the NATO coup in Libya) as keeping Canadians “well informed about the Middle East,” contrary to what many independent journalists contend, e.g., Media Lens and other writers at Dissident Voice. Should readers regard such corporate/state media sources as reliable, especially compared to independent media sources?

GF: All media should be judged critically. The British and Arab sources mentioned above do a comparatively better job than North American sources, but have their own particular problems. Al-Jazeera has lost some credibility since the Saudis bought into it and the station got into North America, and the BBC is largely zionist house-trained; however, it is more likely to broadcast an intelligent Palestinian perspective than anything over here. The Guardian is by far the best of the lot, and I would place it in the first rank along with Le Monde Diplomatique and Press TV’s international service. Generally speaking, independent sources are more reliable because they are not as vulnerable to financial and political pressures. But what matters the most is the way the news is reported, not who reports it.

KP: Anarchist professor Noam Chomsky holds (and I agree) that people should focus on the actions of their own states: “My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it. So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences.” [Noam Chomsky, On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures (South End Press, 1987.)]

Your focus, however, seems to be very much on criticism of Zionist crimes against Palestinians and criticism of Canadian government complicity in Zionist crimes. If there is substance to what Chomsky says, why do you not write more frequently about colonialist crimes against Canada’s Original Peoples, given that non-Indigenous Canadians (similarly to Ashkenazi Jews) live on a land gained through war crimes and dispossession?

GF: I dissent very strongly from Noam Chomsky. He is of the opinion that the U.S. is the dominant partner in the U.S. relationship, and for this reason he directs so much of his criticism towards the U.S. However, I find no support for this position. In fact, the ease with which Israel humiliates U.S. presidents and causes deliberate harm to U.S. interests should be enough to show Chomsky has it backwards. He does not appreciate that the U.S. has no government; Congress and the White House has been so thoroughly colonized by Israel that any discussion of U.S. national policy is a polite joke. I see little merit in the quote you cite. Given the overwhelming zionist influence on U.S. (and Canadian) policy, protesting the actions of one’s national government makes as much sense as treating the symptoms of a disease rather than the cause.

Since I find no substance in what Chomsky says, I see little reason to write about colonialist crimes against Canada’s original peoples. In fact, I go out of my way not to conflate this issue with the zionist destruction of Palestine.

First, I reject the parallel between Ashkenazi Jews and European Canadians. Though there are superficial similarities, the magnitude, duration and sadistic ferocity of Jewish war crimes against Palestine are orders of magnitude beyond what Europeans did to the natives.

Second, the European colonial period is history, and cannot be changed; the Jewish colonial period is current, and can be changed. (I think Chomsky would appreciate this point.)

Third, zionists use Canada’s colonial past to deflect criticism of Israel, such as: “Why criticize Israel when you did the same thing to your natives? You’re nothing but a hypocrite!”

Fourth, Canada’s native leadership is only too happy to suck up to the Israel Lobby and identify the persecution that they suffered with Jewish persecution. This puts Canada’s natives in the position of giving propaganda cover for zionist atrocities.

1. I wrote almost 6 years ago: “Nonetheless, in 1950, the UN General Assembly granted membership to Israel but under certain conditions. UN General Assembly Resolution 273 decreed that Israel must implement UN General Assembly Resolution 181 that defines the borders of Israel and Palestine and Resolution 194 that recognizes the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Israel has so far refused. UN General Assembly Resolutions, however, are not binding under international law.” “Anti-Israel?” Dissident Voice, 27 October 2005.

Banned in Vermont
By Rosemarie Jackowski
Publisher: Shire Press
Manchester, VT (2010)
Paperback, 251 pages
ISBN: 978-1-60571-100-3

Kim Petersen: The title Banned in Vermont refers to antiwar protest being banned in the state?

Rosemarie Jackowski: That and more. I really am talking about the whole issue of freedom of access to information. The problem is that when something is banned — people don’t know that it exists. When a candidate for elected office is banned from debates and forums the voters are unaware of it. This happens during every election in Vermont. Candidates are arrested if they try to participate — unless they are members of the Democratic or Republican Party. Ironically, when copies of BANNED IN VERMONT were donated to the public library, the library banned the book. In my view, that makes it more worthy of being read.

KP: Patriotism. You make a distinction between blind patriotism and informed patriotism. Yet even if people were informed about the great crimes committed by their government, wouldn’t that negate any patriotic sentiment? How can a person love a country that exists because of a genocidal past? I submit that people have to get past loving a geopolitical entity and love people wherever in the world they may live.

RJ: I agree with your thought behind this question. Maybe one can’t love a country with a genocidal past… but in that case, the highest form of patriotism might be in working toward reparations for those who have been victims. An immoral or unjust act cannot be forgiven until amends are made. This is important for the victims but also for the victimizers. I like your point about getting past loving a geopolitical entity and loving ALL people. I often make that point in the book when I say that no one should be given any privilege because of the location of his mother at the time of his birth.

KP: “Any candidate who participates in a forum, which excludes others on the ballot, shows contempt for voters and the democratic process.” What you write is sound insofar as respect for the democratic process; however, for there to be a democratic process, there should be a democracy. Do you consider the United States a democracy?

RJ: No, the United States was never a Democracy. That word gets thrown around a lot. I do believe that there could be a ‘democratic’ process. It would be very hard to achieve, and there would be the issue of the influence of group-think and the pecking order in any attempt at getting to a democratic process.

KP: You consider the topic of justice often and deeply in your book. Have you ever considered that capitalist society has utter contempt for justice, that justice is just a slogan to be wielded for the ends of those who hold power?

RJ: I love this question. I don’t know if there can ever be any justice in a capitalistic society. But, the concept of justice is very important to me… maybe more important than anything else because it encompasses everything. Justice for everyone is even more important than love for all of our fellow beings. Love is an emotion that may or may not result in humanitarian acts. Working for justice for all is a very concrete concept. Working toward justice for all is the ultimate moral dedication of anyone’s life… an important matter of conscience. That is why the back cover of the book states: “Where there is no Justice, nothing else matters. War is the ultimate injustice, because it imposes Capital Punishment on those who have not been Tried or Convicted. Therefore, every Officer of the Court should be openly and actively opposed to war.” There will never be a completely just society, but we surely can do better than what we have now.

KP: What do you mean by your “profound respect for the rule of law”?

RJ: I have respect for some Libertarian and also some Anarchist philosophy. Because people are aware of that, it seemed important to state that I do have “profound respect for the rule of law”. Boundaries on human conduct are necessary because without them we would have rule by ‘the pecking order’. The rich and powerful would have no limits. That is sort of what we now have because the ‘system’ is used as a tool of those in the upper economic class. I have a lot of respect for the rule of law and almost no respect for the legal system as it is. If we had a just legal system, everything would be different. War criminals would be prosecuted. The economic system would be fair – because if it wasn’t, there would be legal recourse.

KP: The reason I asked that question is because law is usually written by those who hold power, not by the unempowered. Therefore, laws can be written to protect the interests of the powerful against the unempowered.

RJ: I see your point. To me the Rule of Law implies Justice — not always the law as it is written. An unjust law would be trumped by the concept of fairness and what is just. Nullification is required when the law is unjust, unethical, or in violation of human rights.

KP: You often mention 1492, yet you wrote, “our government will not regain its legal and moral authority until it gives up its life of international Crime…” Do you believe that the government of the United States ever had legal and moral authority? Given that the country is situated on land gained by the murder and dispossession of its Original Peoples, it seems the only moral and legal action would be to pay reparations and return whatever has been stolen to its rightful owners.

RJ: The legal part is a hazy area. Laws change. Laws are written by whoever happens to be in power at the time. Slavery was legal. Original Peoples have a moral right to reparations. This creates a conundrum. How far back should we go historically? Actually, this is an issue that I think about often because of the suffering of the Palestinians, the Chagossians, and many others. Maybe there is a somewhat fair way to look at this… a formula… mathematically decreasing the reparations over long periods of time. That would mean that land confiscated 50 years ago would deserve greater compensation than land confiscated many, many centuries ago. The bottom line is that it is impossible to undo an immoral or unjust act.

KP: A few things struck me from your answer. First, with all due respect, I submit the bottom line is that morals and human decency demand people of conscience to, as far as possible, atone for the immoral acts of forebears that the descendants are benefitting from now. Living on, and from, that dispossessed from others would seem to fit that bill. Furthermore, there is no statute of limitations for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide under international law. So if how to atone is based in “profound respect for the rule of law” (and I have little respect for laws created by plutocrats, national or international) then surely justice should be carried out according to the law. Second, your formulation posits the longer a people have suffered dispossessions, the lower the reparations would be. Is that not a formula that encourages the dispossessors to draw out the dispossession as long as possible and profit to the maximum before international justice, if it does at all, enforces its tardy laws? Third, and this overlaps somewhat, but your question “How far back should we go historically?” is dangerous because it might encourage the creation of long-term facts on the ground, something Israel is often accused of (and it seems to be a successful strategy for Zionists because few people talk about the legally [which does not imply morally] recognized 1948 borders anymore but refer to the 1967 borders gained through aggression (which is, I submit, a sop to the “supreme international crime”).

RJ: I agree with what you say. My thought was that, for example, justice would require us to place some value on the fact that the land that the USA now occupies was owned by others in 1492. Simply returning all of the land now to the previous owners would punish those who had no responsibility for the original crime. After many generations have passed, that fact has to be considered relevant. On the other hand, the descendants of slaves are closer in generation and still suffering some of the harm of slavery, while others are enjoying some of the benefit. Therefore reparations for slavery would be higher up on the scale. You mention the Zionists and the 1948/1967 borders. What would you say to those who say Israel has the right to land there because they had been there thousands of years ago? Maybe a claim that goes back thousands of years is diluted by time???? How would you answer those who suggest that the nation of Israel should have been located in Europe? Holocaust survivors deserve compensation, but why from the Palestinians? Why not from the Europeans? This topic always reenforces my belief that all religions should be respected. This is currently not a popular view. Many of my friends are absolutely opposed to all religions. They are Evangelical Atheists. I understand their view, but do not agree with it. My view is that actions should be judged, not religious systems. Borders changed through aggression should not be recognized by the international community.

KP: With all due respect, your sentence that vegans “have reached a higher moral plane than the rest of us” sounds hyperbolic to me. For example, what should humans living in Arctic regions subsist on to reach the higher plane?

RJ: You got me with this one. I do believe that vegans have reached a higher moral plane, but I also believe that respect for human life takes precedence for those who have no access to other food. I have had discussions about the morality or immorality of using antibacterial soap, or taking antibiotic medicine. Great topic for philosophical debate, but I come down on the side of human life when forced to choose whether or not to protect the life of a microbe.

KP: You wrote, “The main challenge to 9/11 conspiracy theorists comes from Osama Bin Laden. He explained why the attack occurred.” I do not understand the logic presented since you later call into question the government’s story. Also, how does someone’s view on the reason underlying an attack connect to how the attack was carried out? Why do you label those who question the government’s version of what happened on 9-11 as “conspiracy theorists”?

RJ: I do not believe that the government directly planned and caused 9/11. I refer to 9/11 as ‘the goose that laid the golden grenade’ because the US used it as an excuse for unending war. The government has a long history of lying and is not above sacrificing US citizens. It just seems to me that Blowback is the more likely cause. I am often confronted on this issue by those who disagree with me. Actually, on this issue I am sort of agnostic. The more important question is: “Would it make any difference if someone came forward with absolute proof that 9/11 was a government act?” Probably not — it is on the public record that the USA has killed 500,000 Iraqi children, that 45,000 US citizens die every year from lack of access to health care, that WikiLeaks has exposed government secret plots… on and on. I am convinced that most citizen/voters have very little interest in what the government does and hardly notice. If someone came forward with absolute proof of a government connection to 9/11, it would make the headlines for a day or two and then public interest would be refocused on the latest football scores or which celebrity is sleeping with someone else’s spouse.

KP: I wished you had asked John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, in your interview why it took so long for him to figure out he was a gangster for capitalists. It seems he knew a long time before he gave up the perks he received from his part in the gangsterism.

RJ: That would have been a good question. In a way, maybe many of us share that with Perkins. Living under Capitalism gives the illusion of ‘perks’ to all of us. The pressure from society to ‘fit in’ is a very powerful force. Speaking out against the system is very hazardous and anyone who does it pays a high price. It takes a long time to overcome the toxic misinformation that comes to us from the culture. This makes me think about how many are ‘for peace’ but unwilling to actively oppose war. To oppose war it is necessary to oppose the entire war machine – that includes those who finance the weapons, manufacture the weapon systems, and also those who use the weapons to kill. As a former flag-waver, I do not exonerate myself. Now I finally ‘get it’ and understand the influence of the culture and the school system. There was a time when I believed what the textbooks and teachers taught me. As I say in the book — in the town where I grew up, the only heroes were the ones in military uniforms. Those who are selected as heroes in any culture can have a powerful influence on a young person. Sad to say, now there are uniformed troops going into elementary school classrooms. This is done to honor the troops as role models and instill patriotism in the young student.

KP: Finally, what do you feel is the moral responsibility of judges who rule on laws that they know are immoral and unjust?

RJ: Actually [former New Jersey Superior Court] Judge Andrew Napolitano talks about this often. He talks about Natural Law. In my view this is not even a close call. Morals and justice come first. Maybe that is why I would not be a good lawyer.

Walberg’s Postmodern Imperialism¹ reads like a whodunit novel about the real world but would also serve as a fine — and boldly politically incorrect — political science textbook. Nothing is assumed by the writer beforehand and all terms are clearly defined. As an anti-imperialist Canadian, he has lived in Soviet-era Russia, Uzbekistan, and Egypt. What he offers the reader is therefore nothing less than a lifetime’s work, theoretically original in scope yet comprehensible and assiduously documented. The book abounds with valuable gems scoured from the lost pages of history that are relevant for where we find ourselves amidst the dizzying New World Order, or, is it, Chaos Theory Realized? Walberg notes that “… ‘a postmodern imperialism’, devoid of messy competitive wars for colonies” was the post Cold War era goal for world peace — but as we can see entropy seems to outweigh equilibrium these days.

This book includes 5 chapters and a number of appendixes. Chapter one deals with classical imperialism Great Game I (GGI); Chapter two with GGII, the anti communist period and the Cold War; Chapters three and four sharply define the role of Israel, Jewish and Zionist power in global and especially US politics/imperialism. The final chapter gives us a current scenario of struggles for power and political machinations to grab the last resources, winner take all and devil take the hindmost.

The setting for the classical “Great Game” is focused largely on Europe’s important role in Central Asia and the Middle East where European, North American and other powers such as Russia and China have struggled to expand their influence and territories. Walberg notes, “[t]he term ‘Great Game’ was coined in the nineteenth century to describe the rivalry between Russia and Britain.” The focus of this book is on the last two centuries, and takes us up to the present day analyzing many regions of the world where imperialism has had an affect.

Chapter 1 of the book, “GGI: Competing empires”, tells the story of how European powers “carved up” much of the world to their own advantage. I found this chapter very interesting since one often wonders how the countries we have today in the world came about. In many parts of the world it was directly due to GGI, where arbitrary borders were drawn in places like Africa that separated tribes according to new and arbitrary national borders.

After seven centuries, the fates of both the Middle East and Central Asia have once again converged. But today, the vast region, with its dozens of ethnic groups, tribes, and clans, is composed of largely artificial states, the result of imperial divide-and-rule, inciting friction between peoples who had not experienced such brutal wars and invasions since the fourteenth century. The vast region is once again discovering common roots in Islam, now the chief catalyst of dissent and resistance to the imperial players, the US and Israel, bent as they are on further dismembering the region.

GGI also included the United States, although less of a power at that time,

America’s geography prevents any rival from challenging this state of affairs, unlike the much vaster Eurasia, stretching both east-west and north-south, containing more than 80 per cent of the world’s population, with many rivals contending for hegemony.

As one reads along startling claims jump off the page: did you know WWI was caused by the British Empire and the “International Bankers” in order to push Germany out of competition? Previous to that time, “[t]raditional imperialism was based on the gold standard and mercantilism — the center amassing gold from the periphery either through direct theft or trade. London was the banking center that ensured the pound as international reserve currency based on gold.” Try that line out at the next party you attend and cause a Fox News fan to spill their drink on their Armani suit. If that doesn’t startle the uninitiated, Walberg states that “the events of [September] 2001 had far more to do with US imperialism—and Israel—than Islam.” This fact may cause the Islamophobes, which includes a great many Americans due to their having been brainwashed by the media, to sputter in a fit of anger, possibly spurting blood from a bitten lip or chipped tooth.

Basic concepts of imperialism are explained: “[t]he term geopolitics refers to the use of politics in controlling territories.” This in itself is interesting given the term “geopolitics” is the academically acceptable form of “imperialism.” This is similar to when the US War Dept. changed its name to the Dept. of Defense (DOD, or, Dept. of Killing the Defenseless).

We also learn about “Lebensraum” the German term which defines that:

that Eurasian land borders in the massive expanse of Eurasia are arbitrary and can be changed to meet the increasing needs of the population and industry…. states are organic and growing, artificial constructs, that the land and people form a spiritual bond, and that a healthy nation’s borders are bound to expand. This was the Monroe Doctrine and the concurrent Manifest Destiny writ large for the Eurasian continent.

Not surprisingly, “[t]he goal of empire, and of all the games described here, is some variation on economic growth, the pursuit of profit, and (for public consumption) improving the well-being of the backward peoples — the latter infamously dubbed “the white man’s burden” by Rudyard Kipling…” Thus, as nation states solidified their own territories in Europe and America, technology allowed for ever greater expansion and expressions of violence of conquest. Although imperialism began as far back as the days of Columbus, by the 19th century the great game of “might makes right” was underway against the indigenous peoples of the world.

Already by the nineteenth century there was no such thing as neutral territory. The entire world was now a gigantic playing field for the major industrial powers, and Eurasia was the center of this playing field. The game motif is useful to describe the broader rivalry between nations and economic systems with the rise of imperialism and the pursuit of world power.

But as all good people of common and natural sense know, violence begets violence, and to live by the sword is to die by the sword: World War I which was started by the International bankers, was a disaster for European society. Death on a large scale in the first world war led to WWII due to the unjust arrangements dictated to Germany, largely under the influence of Jewish financiers.² Walberg writes:

Whichever side ‘won’ WWI, the international bankers were guaranteed to emerge the true victors, with both warring parties deeply in debt to the international banking elite… in 1919, the CFR [Council on Foreign Relations] was established in New York, financed by Morgan money, which would be the mouthpiece of the American branch of the now Anglo-American empire…. The international bankers, who enjoyed the protection of the British crown around the world, were well aware that the British government was virtually bankrupt by the outbreak of WWI. They were already focusing on the US and were able to pressure President Woodrow Wilson to sign the US Federal Reserve Act in 1913, putting money creation in the US in the hands of private bankers rather than of government, as it was already in Britain, France and Germany. These GGI central banks were already moving towards the financial endgame of imperialism — the creation of a world system of financial control in private hands…. The creation of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, in 1930, ostensibly to manage German reparations payments, marked a new stage in the globalization of financial capital, with the BIS a ‘coordinator of the operations of central banks around the world’.

Indeed, as the book The Empire of the City: The Secret History of British Financial Power claims, the international banking cartel played a decisive role in intentionally setting off some 20 wars, by funding multiple parties, during the 19th and 20th centuries. When countries are at war they go into debt, and the debt must be paid to the bankers.³

Walberg places attention on the Rothschild banking family, especially during GGI, yet noting that even today “[t]here are only 5 nations without a Rothschild model central bank: North Korea, Iran, Sudan, Cuba, and Libya. Until recently, there were two others: Afghanistan and Iraq.” As Michael Collins Piper who recently tackled the issue of Rothschild banking and political power has written:

The Rothschild family are the “King of Kings” — if only by virtue of their immense wealth. And they are, beyond doubt, the royal family of Jewry. It is thus no coincidence that on Jan. 2, 2009, Moses L. Pava, a Jewish professor of business ethics admitted candidly in the Jewish newspaper, Forward, that: ‘Our Jewish communities which once honored rabbis and scholars, now almost exclusively honor those with the biggest bank accounts.’ And those with the biggest bank accounts are the Rothschilds.⁴

Walberg’s interpretation of the Russian revolution will be controversial to some on the political Right, who see that part of history as an overthrow of an imperfect monarchy by something far worse, Soviet communism. Walberg is mindful of the Stalinist holocaust against Russian peasants and mass starvation in the Ukraine, as well as ecological destruction caused by the Soviet system. But he writes, “the Russian revolution in 1917 was a declaration of war against the imperialist system itself. This marked the beginning of what is called here Great Game II (GGII) — the Cold War between imperialism and communism.”

Thus, during the Cold War years the US branded any form of independent development around the world as “communist” whether it was or not, and had to destroy it through a variety of hard and soft power methods. Which brings us up to “the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc in 1989–91 and the beginning of what is called here Great Game III (GGIII)” which mainly concerns “the two regions—the Middle East and Central Asia.” As anyone who follows the news today knows, many savage wars of geopolitics in the search for abundant natural resources are taking place in those regions of the world.

Speaking of how Walberg himself came to a critical view of politics, he recalls his days as a student when his view about communism became sympathetic: “[i]mperialism was not an abstraction, but a devastating force that destroyed good, idealistic people, whole peoples. Enemies of imperialism must be reconsidered, in the first place, the Soviet Union, which until then I had accepted as a dangerous and evil force in the world.” From the end of WWII the US became the global policeman (or thug): “[t]he US itself is the source of much of the world’s terrorism, its 1.6 million troops in over a thousand bases around the world the most egregious terrorists.” Walberg does not draw a simplistic analysis of Soviet crimes, yet still sides with the ideals of the former SU against the evil West:

The Soviet Union produced environmental disasters, notably the death of the Aral Sea. Collective farming enforced at gunpoint destroyed a vibrant peasant tradition. The gulags and Stalinist repression were a terrible tragedy. But colonialism and fascism killed far more innocent people, and both were aggressive, starting wars with other countries. The Soviet Union was a one-party system, a dictatorship, but not an aggressively expanding empire, contrary to what we were and are indoctrinated into believing.

I found Chapter 2 to be the least exciting given that it reads like a standard Left critique of post WWII US foreign policy, as encountered in such important works as William Blum’s Killing Hope and the works of Noam Chomsky and Michael Parenti. While all of these authors including Walberg are correct that the US used the pretext of “fighting communism” in order to crush independent democratic and free market development in the Third World, many believe this argument makes the former Soviet Union come off smelling too sweet whereas communism’s crimes have been too much ignored by the Left.

Chapters 4 and 5 integrate the classic critique of imperialism with an understanding of the Jewish power structure, as readers of the works of Israel Shamir, James Petras, and a fairly large and growing number of Internet journalists and bloggers have now championed. This aspect of the book breaks new ground. The synthesis of Zionist ideology and American military might emerged as the new political ideology of neoconservatism, which led to the Iraq war blood bath of 2003 and the death of millions of Iraqis. This is the doorstep we find ourselves sitting on today, a world of wars on the behest of Israel, Big Oil, Military Industry and ultimately the international banking cartel. A postmodern and most deadly game.

While it is now possible to criticize Israel, Walberg notes that “[n]one of the mainstream critics of the [Israel] lobby dares to point to the continuity between the Israel lobby and the fatal embrace by Jewish elites of past empires.” Indeed, Benjamin Ginsberg’s Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State, details with pride Jewish involvement in the economic history of the United States. He shows how Jewish families in the 19th century such as the American Seligman’s financed the US Navy and the building of the Panama Canal and the German Schiff’s helped finance the post Civil War railroad building that tamed the American continent. “Like their British counterparts, late nineteenth century American-Jewish financiers were proponents of imperialist programs and policies and participants in the American imperialist coalition of the period.”⁵

The departure from a standard Left critique of US imperialism is boldly evident by reading Walberg’s chapter and subheading titles which include: Chapter 3 GGIII: US-Israel Postmodern Imperialism; Chapter 4 GGII: Israel — Empire -and-a-half; Judaism and Zionism — goals; Jews and the state through history; and The Israel Lobby and ‘Dog wags tail’ debate. Walberg cites plenty of evidence that Jewish interests control the US political system, which as Walt and Mearsheimer are famous for arguing is onerous not only to the United States but to Israel itself, both of which countries are set on a path of self and mutual destruction, from within and from enemies whom they have created through their bellicose behavior. Minds as sharp as professor emeritus of politics, James Petras, to Obama’s failed nominee (he was too anti Zionistic) for chair of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), Charles Freeman, have shown beyond doubt, The Tail Wags The Dog. Anyone who cares to research the topic can see that Jewish interests are involved in political, financial, and media far out of proportion to the numbers of Jewish voters or consumers they purport to represent. The pseudo Bibilcal and cranky ideology of the 70 million Christian Zionist supporters of the Jewish power system is heading us into moral degradation, economic collapse and brutal Soviet style police state conditions.

The final chapter of the book deals with the complex machinations of nation states and multinational corporate interests, that overlap and conflict. In a world of scarce resources and grotesque inequality, the Great Game is increasingly turning into a Terrible Nightmare for a majority of the world’s population that must battle the latter stages of an ecocidal and unsustainable imperialist system.

1. Eric Walberg (2011). Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games.
2. A.J.P. Taylor (1961). The Origins of The Second World War. ), ((Ingrid Rimland Zundel (July, 2011). “Japan in WWII: A Casualty of Usury? Was WWII Fought to make the World Safe for the Bankers?“
3. E. C. Knuth (1944). The Empire of “The City.”
4. Michael Collins Piper (2009).The New Babylon: Those Who Reign Supreme, a Panoramic Overview of the Historical, Religious and Economic Origins of the New World Order.
5. Benjamin Ginsberg (1993). The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State.

Rather, one of Sheehi’s primary aims was to challenge the Left, so-called “progressives” and liberals to face an uncomfortable truth, their own Islamophobia. “When people ask me at conferences, ‘What should be done?’ I tell them to stop asking questions about Islam. Just stop. It is racist to ask ‘Why are the Muslims different?’ or ‘I want to understand the Muslims so I am going to read the Qur’an’,” said Sheehi in Beirut.

Indeed, as if people read the Vedas to understand militant Hinduism, the Torah to comprehend the mindset of Jewish colonial settlers in the West Bank or the Bible to make sense of the Tea Party movement. But such seemingly well-meaning questions about Islam by leftists and liberals of all stripes just goes to reinforce the notion of Muslims as the “Other,” set apart in need of “tolerance” and “understanding.”

“Despite the genuine and scholarly research into the topic, the questions must stop being about Islam and democracy, Islam and modernity, Islam and human rights, Islam and women, and so forth,” writes Sheehi. “We must stop searching for answers, or making accusations for that matter, based on the binaries of Islam and the Whatever. We must reach beyond the Jihad vs. McWorld dichotomy.”²

Coming to terms with the widespread prevalence of Islamophobia in the US mainstream and how it has been adopted consciously and unconsciously by the populace, the unsaid fears of Anglo-Saxon America of “brown people empowering themselves”, as Sheehi put it, and the myth of US exceptionalism all plays into the lengthy history of America’s racism, from the days of slavery to the Monroe Doctrine to the current racial profiling. “The US has to look at itself and ask, why are we so racist?” said Sheehi.

He writes that “Islamophobia is the ideological foil that allows the state to control its population, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, as well as institute military and political policies abroad (if not at the US’s own southern border).”³ Sheehi goes on: “Cultural Islamophobia and legislation are two of these mechanisms. The plight of non-American Muslims and Arab defendants is a more severe version of the plight of Muslims and Arabs in America.”⁴

For behind this foil is systemic racism and symbolic violence towards the minority, such as through structural exclusion or marginalization of those that do not embrace hegemonic ideologies.

As Sheehi observes in his work, this was manifest in the number of non-Muslims beaten up, abused and profiled in the wake of 9/11 because they “looked” Arab or Muslim. “In the end, Islamophobia is not about Muslims, for next up is Latinophobia,” said Sheehi.

So-called liberals always look for a scapegoat to justify Islamophobia and cling to the notion that it isn’t “us” perpetuating this divisiveness and ideology, it is someone else, another group, the right wing, the Neo-Conservatives, the Jews, Evangelical Christians and so on. Indeed, some presumed Sheehi would put the blame for Islamophobia squarely on the shoulders of the pro-Israel lobby.

The pro-Israel lobby and Zionist political action groups are of course a factor in shaping the discourse and ideology of Islamophobia, but that gives them too much credit. Islamophobia is more insidious, more widespread than that, and blaming “the Jews” is too easy as well as being off the mark. The same goes for lumping all the blame on the right wing. Sheehi doesn’t want the liberal conscious to be soothed as they are in fact a part of the problem.

“The Neo-Cons, the Republicans and the rampant racists got a raw deal with regard to Islamophobia, because they are a comfortable container of white liberal America to cordon off their own prejudices. Liberals state that they are “not against Muslims but only terrorists,” yet at the same time supporting the renewal of the Patriot Act, supporting the war in Afghanistan and believing Iraq is no longer occupied as the number of troops was reduced,” said Sheehi.⁵

The spirit of Islamophobia

Sheehi argues that Islamophobia was around well before 9/11 and Bush Jr’s administration, but the 2001 attacks proved to be a catalyst for Islamophobia to run wild. “9/11 allowed views that were on the fringe during the 1980s and even the 1990s to be seamlessly inserted into the American mainstream,” writes Sheehi. Pseudo-scholar Daniel Pipes “demonstrates how old racist and Orientalist tropes can be re-invented and inserted into a new political atmosphere with newness and urgency. In effect, the rants of the right create the conditions by which these diatribes then become relevant and lose their air of bigotry, if not lunacy.”⁶

One reason there are 54 pages of footnotes accompanying the 227 page text is that Sheehi, like hounded academic Churchill Ward, who wrote the foreword (the preface is by Mumia Abu Jamal), is to back up research in the face of legal action over opinions on Islamophobia and Islamophobes. Such are the times American academia is living in, superbly illustrated in chapters “Teaching and Activism in the Teeth of Power,” and “Living in a State of Fear.”

It was the post-Cold war era, global financialization and 9/11 that brought Islamophobia truly into the collective consciousness. Sheehi writes, “Ideological Islamophobia arises from the global era. Not only does it arise from the US desire to control global oil resources but also from its cultural Islamophobia and the willingness of the American public to stereotype, target, and violate the rights and humanity of Muslims and Arabs. American culture has evolved from a settler culture to become an imperial culture. Arabs and Muslims are perceived as the latest cultural holdouts that are resistant to its global hegemony, which the US purveys as offering modernity, democracy and capitalist prosperity.”⁴

This is a crucial point and one that many liberals and Leftists frequently overlook. This is not to suggest – and Sheehi doesn’t – that the Left make strategic alliances with, or vocally support, Islamist political groups because they are also resisting globalization and US imperialism. That would be akin to saying that you have to be pro Hamas, Fatah or Hizbullah to support the Palestinian cause and oppose Israel.

As Sheehi observed: “Critics will say that the arguments of this book exonerate those who are involved in truly terrorist action against civilians, whether they live in North America, Europe or the Middle East. They prefer to cast such aspersions rather than understand the historical and political motivations behind desperate and violent acts such as the bombings of 9/11, the public transportation bombings in London and Madrid, or the car bombing of an apartment complex in Riyadh in 2003, which killed not US soldiers but largely expatriate Arab and Asian families and workers.”⁷

That many liberals and leftists fall for Islamophobic ideology is reflective of how many people bought into Samuel Huntington’s racist notion of the “Clash of Civilizations.” Rooted in this Islamophobia is blatant ignorance, a lack of understanding of history and an unwillingness to understand political Islam.

“A critical misunderstanding of political Islam often comes from the inability to differentiate between political Islam’s many strains that materialized as a component of modernity rather than strictly as a reactive gesture to it…The problem comes from the fact that the American commentators have no understanding of the force and meaning of modernity as it impacts the developing, colonized world. A critical understanding of political Islam as a complicated and multifaceted social, historical, economic and political phenomenon would not apologize for political violence but instead, serve to clarify its origins, logic and inspirations,” writes Sheehi.⁸

Islamophobia reinvents itself

“Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden became a vessel, a psychological manifestation that is part of the Islamophobic world paradigm for the US to justify its policies. The whole point of Islamophobia is that the image of Bin Laden is a manifestation of Islamophobic stereotypes that were reproduced and grafted onto every Muslim as US foreign policy needs that,” said Sheehi.

Bin Laden’s assassination in May in this sense is irrelevant to keeping the stereotypes and Islamophobia alive. But the overwhelming jubilance of the American population’s reaction to his demise, and the name of the operation itself – Geronimo – speaks volumes about how deep Islamophobia has penetrated America, how it was symbolized in the burning hatred of one man, as well as the establishment’s ongoing disregard of America’s indigenous culture and people.

The ability of the ideology of Islamophobia to adapt is similar to capitalism’s ability to re-invent itself despite systemic setbacks and how factors change on the ground. This is not surprising as the two are inter-related, Islamophobia used to justify imperialist and capitalist ventures.

The uprisings in the Arab world this year are a case in point, as the revolts discredit the vitriol of Bernard Lewis and Fareed Zakaria when they say things like there is no civil society in the Arab world (both writers come in for substantial criticism in the book).

“The “Arab Spring” discredits the Lewis style stereotypes of the “Arab Street,” of a complacent, dormant, passive mass led by emotion and reliant on the rentier state system. It shows that this is completely false. Yet you hear the other side, of ‘Oh my God, there’s a bunch of Arabs in the streets, what shall we do?’ There is this fear of instability as the dictators were always convenient for providing security. There is a fear of brown people empowering themselves,” said Sheehi.

And when it comes to other portrayals of the Arab uprisings – depending on who the official enemy is, Bahrain no, Libya, Syria etc. yes – it is easy to play into stereotypes, such as the ludicrous story about Muammar Gaddafi ordering a container load of Viagra so his soldiers could rape women. The story was picked up worldwide as a sensationalist example of Gaddafi’s despotism and even cited by the International Criminal Court to indict the Libyan leader despite there being no credible evidence. Indeed, a senior crisis response officer for Amnesty International that spent three months in Libya said last month there was no evidence at all of soldiers using Viagra — indeed, when have soldiers ever needed sexual stimulants to commit rape? “The Viagra story played into the racial stereotype of over-sexualized brown men,” said Sheehi.⁹

Essentially, Sheehi is saying that liberals, leftists etc are not willing to challenge some of their conscious or unconscious racist feelings of not just the US being undermined on the world stage, but that the white man will no longer rule the planet. That President Barrack Obama is not white is not relevant in this regard, argues Sheehi, as he is just a new face, a more acceptable front man of American imperialism than Bush Jr. was (Sheehi’s analysis of Obama’s speech to the Muslim world in Cairo in June, 2009, and the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech are especially biting).

“It has never been about whether, say, the Egyptians are capable of ruling themselves or not, it is about if the Egyptians can be managed under the same economic and political system as before,” said Sheehi. “The US would throw the Bahraini royal family under a bus quicker than you could sneeze if the monarchy lost their relevance to the US. If all the Sunnis and Shias suddenly get along there would be no need for the US Fifth Fleet [to be in Bahrain]. That is the point and how the US stays relevant in the Middle East.”

Just as America has actively worked with the Saudis and the region’s monarchies to perpetuate discord between the Sunni and Shia on a macro Islamic level – what some on the Hill off-handedly call the “Sushi war” – Islamophobia creates a further wedge between the left on how to effectively tackle issues like the erosion of civil liberties, women’s rights, classism, and imperialist wars.

The US’s cultural, economic and military hegemony also enables the ideology of Islamophobia to be adopted on a wider level, as witnessed in the rest of the West, India and anywhere Islamophobia can be used as a political tool, and must be challenged as much as in the US.

This was glaring apparent as news broke on July 22 of the attacks in Norway. The immediate suspect in European and American media was Al Qaeda, with journalists scrambling to make a tangible link to “Islamic terrorism” and garner quotes from pundits as to why this was likely. Islamophobes had a field day. As we know it turned out to be a right-wing Norwegian apparently operating solo, but it took time for the discourse to switch away from the bogeymen of our time, particularly in the US.¹⁰

The late Edward Said taught us about Orientalism in literature and the need to de-colonize our minds. Sheehi in his work challenges us to intellectually confront Islamophobia and wake up to its prevalence in the mainstream as well as in “alternative” movements.

1. Stephen Sheehi is Associate Professor of Arabic and Arab Culture and Director of the Arabic Program at the University of South Carolina.
2. Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims, Stephen Sheehi, Clarity Press, Atlanta (2011), p 225.
3. P. 222.
4. P. 166.
5. Indicative of this is that in Iraq, while US troop levels have dropped since 2008, private military contractors actually increased by 39 percent, or 3,500 personnel, by the end of 2010 to reach approximately 13,000 personnel, or 18 percent of all contractors, according to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service.
6. P. 140.
7. P. 170.
8. P. 23.
9. “What’s really at stake in Libya,” Pepe Escobar, June 30, 2011.
10. See “Blaming Muslims – Yet Again,” D Parvaz, June 23, 2001.

The former category refers to writers and scholars who operate ‘within the box,’ accepting the restrictive measures of a given political and intellectual discourse. A thinker who operates within such a framework would initially identify the boundaries of the discourse, and then shape his or her ideas to fit in accordingly. The latter category refers to a far more challenging intellectual attempt: it includes those very few who operate within a post-political realm, those who defy the dictatorship of ‘political-correctness’, or any given ‘party-line’. It relates to those minds that think ‘out of the box’. And it is actually those who, like artists, plant the seeds of a possible conceptual and consciousness shift.

Sadly enough, the Western Palestinian solidarity discourse is far from being saturated by great intellectually and spiritually enlightening texts. For very many years the discourse has failed to address the most crucial questions regarding the local and global success of Zionism and Israel. For far too many years now, very few have dared to question the role of Jewish lobbying and the obvious continuum between the Jewish State, Jewish culture, Jewish religion, and ideology. Many years of Left hegemony at the heart of the Palestinian solidarity discourse is part of the problem, but this fact can be easily explained and even justified.

Zionism was born in the late 19th century, and like other emerging political movements at the time, it clearly conveyed some clear modernist¹ ideological symptoms. It was fuelled by the spirit of enlightenment. It presented a ‘rational’, secular, coherent and structural argument for Jewish self- determination and re-location.² It was driven by Eurocentric modernist pseudo-scientific, biological-determinist poeticism.³ Political Zionism found itself negotiating extensively with the leading empires at the time, most of whom were modernist by definition. It is only reasonable to assume that Zionism, manifesting itself as a modernist ideology, would be opposed by other 19th century anti-colonial modernist ideologies such as Marxism, ‘working class politics’, dialectical materialism, cosmopolitanism or Left thinking in general.

Yet, unlike the Left thinking that is in constant danger of structural and intellectual stagnation, Zionism has proved to be an inherently dynamic political movement: it has never stopped evolving and reinventing itself. The history of Zionism reveals a clear success story. Within just six decades, Zionism fulfilled its initial promise and founded the ‘Jews only’ State, at the expense of the Palestinians. It achieved its initial goal with the vast support of the world’s richest nations and leading superpowers. By 1967 it had managed to mobilise the entirety of world Jewry, and had transformed Jewish elites into a fierce fist of Jewish power. By then, Zionism had also changed its course — instead of schlepping Jews to Palestine, it gathered that Israel would actually benefit if Diaspora Jews stayed exactly where they were, and mounted pressure on their respective governments. By the end of the 20th century, Israel has managed to transform the English-speaking empire into an Israeli mission force. In 2003 Britain and the USA sent their sons and daughters to destroy Iraq, the last fierce enemy of Israel in the region. And yet, at the time there was hardly any critical theory that could shed light onto the immense power of Israel and its lobbies within the Anglo-American political world. There was no political theory that would explain the Anglo-American’s suicidal decision to fight illegal wars for Israel. There was also a noticeable and substantial lack of scholarly work that could throw some light on the sudden twist within Western elites against Islam and Muslims. Being modernist, Eurocentric and secularist, the Left found it hard, or even impossible to deal with the complexity of both Islam and Jewish ideology.

Yet, unlike Marxism, or any other form of progressive thinking, Zionism has never been truly committed to any structural modernist way of thought. Zionism is primarily loyal to Jews and what it perceives as their needs. The simple truth is that Zionism was very quick to drift away from modernism. The deeper truth is that Zionism has never been a genuinely modernist precept. Zionism is basically a Zelig populist-pragmatic outlook, which goes through rapid metamorphic shapes, incarnations and affiliations, just to fit into any given discourse that suits its purposes. Indeed, Zionism masked itself as a modernist political ideology when it was needed, and it was secularist and rational when these ideas were broadly appealing. But it also easily developed a religious-evangelist flavour — when the prospects of such transitions could be translated into power.

Zionism was also very quick to grasp postmodern conditions; it may even be argued that it has been the first to define these conditions. Zionism allows itself to be contradictory,⁴ irrational at times, tribal and emotional on other occasions. These facts alone may explain why the Left has failed to offer an adequate criticism of Zionism and Israel, for if Zionism and Israel belong to the realm of post modernity, then we could hardly expect any modernist scholarship to provide a comprehensive reading into the complexity of the situation.

In recent years we have seen a few successful attempts to break away from the traditional Left, materialist and modernist political analysis of Zionism and Israeli politics. James Petras, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt were among the first to publish academic work on the immense and disastrous impact of the ‘Israeli Lobby’ (a politically correct wording for Jewish power). Two years ago Shahid Alam published Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilising Logic of Zionism, an incredibly courageous scholarly attempt to grasp the destructive role of Jewish power in America and beyond. Petras, Mearsheimer, Walt, and Alam operated out of the box: their criticism of Israel, Zionism and Jewish power was not restricted by a party-line or by any given political consensus or paradigm. Quite the opposite, their work broke away from their contemporaneous paradigms and brought into life a new discourse that now shapes itself into an extensive body of thought, as well as providing politically pragmatic applications.⁵ As one may expect, Petras, Mearsheimer and Walt were criticised by elements within the Left, and especially by prominent Jewish voices within the Left. But they prevailed. Wisdom and true intellectual insights cannot be contained. At the most, these voices can be silenced or suppressed for a short while but they always hit back with much greater rigour.

This week we saw the publication of Eric Walberg’s Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games (Clarity Press), a substantial addition to the aforementioned and precious ‘out of the box’ category.

The book sketches a fascinating historical journey that provides Walberg with the necessary means to unveil the unique particularity of the postmodern conditions we are subject to. Walberg provides us with an extensive expose of the depth of the Zionist penetration into Western thought and the destructive power of Israeli imperial wars.

In order to achieve his goal, Walberg sets an historical template. He identifies three crucial phases in the past and recent imperial affairs: Great Game I (GGI) refers to ‘classical imperialism’ with competing empires vying for territories and resources.

Great Game II (GGII) refers largely to the cold war and the alliance of formerly competing Western empires under US hegemony in an attempt to restrain communism and contain its influence.

Great Game III (GGIII) is where we are now–the postmodern phase. It starts roughly with the collapse of the Soviet block. It can be described broadly in Neo-conservative terms as American unilateral world domination through absolute military superiority. But such a definition would be misleading. In reality we encounter the total Israeli-fication of America and its elites. In practice what we see is America willingly lending its might to a miniature Jewish state.

GGIII is the victorious march of Israeli, Zionist, and Jewish power. Walberg’s analysis is there to explain the shameless reaction of American senators and congressmen to Netanyahu’s speech recently. It explains why America, once regarded as a leader of the free world, is now lending its destructive might to the miniature Jewish state. The frightening truth is that Israel is now an ‘Empire and-a-Half’ as Walberg calls it. It has, at its disposal, the world’s only superpower that fights its wars by proxy and provides for its needs. Devastatingly enough, America doesn’t find within itself the power to liberate itself. The world’s single super power’s elite is practically held hostage by a miniature state and its supportive lobbies.

Like other significantly illuminating texts, Walberg provides the reader with the fundamental means to intercept the Zion-ised reality in which we live. Those who read the book may be able to grasp the current Murdoch affair and the role of his media empire within the context of global Zionism. Just less than a year ago, the media magnate accepted the ADL Award. In 2003 Murdoch’s media network rallied in support of the ‘War Against Terror’. Murdoch should have been stopped by the British Government or the Parliament, but as it seems, all recent British Governments and parties have been supported heavily by the Israeli Lobby in Britain. When this country was taken into an illegal war in Iraq, Lord cashpoint Levy was Tony Blair’s ‘number one’ fundraiser.

Walberg produces a thorough reading of the various elements that made Israel into an ‘Empire and-a-Half’. Fearlessly he looks into Judaism: he examines scholarly works dealing with the complex relationship between ‘Jews and the state’, he elaborates on Jewish and Zionist ideologies, he unveils the role of Jewish oligarchs. Walberg also examines the tactics and strategies that are put into action by Israel and its supporters: global wars, nuclear armament, soft power, sayanim, spies and gatekeepers. He elaborates on the Israeli Lobby and their media manipulation. He also discloses the role of some Jewish elements within the Left in stifling free discourse and diverting attention from the real issues.

Towards the end of the book Walberg reveals the bitter truth: Israel is actually far more independent than America, its supportive backing empire: “Despite the continuation of its special relationship with the US, Israel is playing an increasingly independent role in GGIII around the world, with its government, corporations and kosher nostra working with whatever states and non-state actors are willing to condone its deadly games, selling arms, smuggling drugs, buying blood diamonds from Africa, conducting covert operations to subvert governments, assassinating opponents, forging passports… Its Diaspora community and Chabad network, found in virtually every corner of the globe, facilitate its game plan, keeping ahead of US plans and technology through its American Sayanim, operatives, spies and powerful lobby.” (p. 235.)

It seems as if Israel is well ahead of America in every possible field. If Israel has ever been a ‘Golem’ created by the ‘colonial powers’ as some Left thinkers insist to suggest, than it is pretty obvious that the ‘Golem’ has turned on its creator. “In keeping with Jewish survival strategy throughout history,” Walberg continues, “Israel’s plans are more subtle than those of the current ruling US empire, as it cannot hope to subdue the world directly, but rather primarily by shaping or subverting its host empire’s aims and strategies, to achieve its geopolitical “place in the sun” both through its Diaspora and through its own use of statecraft and subversion, untroubled by world reaction.”(p. 235)

Walberg’s Postmodern Imperialism is a landmark text, written at a crucial moment in time. For the West, America and Americans, this may be a final wake-up call. For Israel, Israelis and their supporters around the world, this text is a red alert. Israel urgently needs to find the way to restrain its ‘global expansionist enthusiasm’ before it is too late. In fact, it may be too late already.

1. The notion of modernity in this text refers to intellectual culture intertwined with ‘grand narratives’, rationality, enlightenment, coherence, science, secularisation, binary opposition and related factors.
2. Jews like all other people should have a land of their own.
3. Let us examine Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s “The Song Of Betar”:

   “A Jew even in poverty is a prince
   Though a slave or a tramp.
   You were created the son of a king,
   Crowned with David’s crown,
   The crown of pride and strife.”

4. Victim and oppressor.
5. Move Over AIPAC is certainly a good example of the above.